


Clothes of Form; (Or, Fashion As a Means to an Identity)

by redyucca



Series: no, you move [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Black Panther AU, Complete, Content entirely made up of dumb rambling, F/F, Gen, M/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Officially, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Science Fiction, because that movie could've been way better, kind of (alternate universe where Nakia and T'Challa don't get back together), philosophy and shit, slightly influenced by interstellar, this is mostly just an intellectual exercise, whoops now it kind of has a plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-10-05 23:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17334395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redyucca/pseuds/redyucca
Summary: Suddenly there was a ground and Sam had the feet to stand on it.He was breathing. And dizzy. And knew what beautiful things were.He looked up and saw that he was in a beautiful place.“How’d you do that so quickly?” a voice asked.-------------Sam saves the universe inside a stone by thinking real hard about it. Steve helps from the outside with the strength of his love and because he is very good at compartmentalizing. Also Nakia and Okoye are there--they are possibly the real heroes.





	1. Chapter 1

**PART I: THE TESSERACT**

The Wakandan soil was forgiving on Steve’s knees. Though his ears were ringing and his skull was creaking as it wove itself back together, Steve was comfortable on the soft ground, his fingers sifting through the still crumbling dust of Bucky’s body ( _his vessel, from whence he came, received once more…_ ). 

“Where’s Sam?” Steve asked Natasha. She was standing silently to his right, a sentinel, waiting for a reaction—a reaction from him, from herself, from the world at large. She didn’t reply to his question. 

“Nat?” Steve asked again, in a heavy whisper. He looked up at her, pulling his hands away from the dust ( _Bucky_ ) and resting them on his thighs. Natasha’s face was blank. No shrug or calculated head tilt. Steve nearly asked, _Where are you?_

He twisted around and looked past Natasha, flickering a shaky gaze from one blank face to the next. Finally, he turned to Okoye who was pacing and fiddling with her beads. They locked eyes, hers unblinking under a concentrated frown. For a moment they waited for the other, sitting under the other’s scrutiny. Okoye nodded somewhat maniacally and Steve sighed and dropped his chin to his chest.

Rhodey made a small noise.

“Couldn’t find him, Steve,” he said, straightforward like a soldier: broken like a soldier. Steve’s lungs turned to steel. “I found some—dust—near where I saw him fall…he’s gone. They’re all just… gone.”

Rocket choked on a sob, cracking the glass around their collective stunned silence, opening up a bog of bewildered grief. Steve pulled his hands up to his sternum, folded them together, and pushed his face up towards the sky. It was a beautiful day. The moisture from the sea had blown inland, diluting the sun’s heat and lending a briny freshness to the air. _Good flying conditions_ , Sam had said. _Good fighting conditions_ , Steve had wanted to reply ironically. But that attitude had been too hard to reach before battle and it was impossible to reach now. Steve closed his eyes and pictured his mother’s rosary, wooden and clean and quiet. He began the cycle.

_Hail, Mary, Full of Grace…_

Far in the distance, across the landscape of his mind, he saw a golden flutter of wings. As he knelt in supplication in the dust of his brother, forever lost, Steve saw the merciless face of God.   
~

Sam was aware of himself but he didn’t have a body—maybe. He was floating, maybe, in a vast planetarium. A planetarium without any seats, or the hum of an air condition—a planetarium with a crystal dome made of stained glass, only instead of sunlight shining in, it was pure starlight. The dome itself was hardly a dome, but rather a series of fractals competing against each other, but in a nice sportsman-like manner. Sam wondered ever so briefly why he couldn’t hear the sound of a million nebulas grinding out stars—but however much it looked like a blown-up poster of Andromeda, suspended and stretched and painted on glass, Sam did not have the ears to perceive it. 

It, this vast space, was beautiful. At least, Sam assumed it was. He was finding it hard to identify the concept of beauty now that the word bounced across his disembodied mind. _Stained glass windows, bright colorful nebulas, sparkles in the distance,_ Sam thought, taking quick note of his surroundings. He felt himself start to spin wildly about, and the harder he tried to ground himself in something other than this (beautiful?) abstraction, the more torn apart he felt. Sam was dizzy and othered from ‘Sam’ but then couldn’t figure out what dizzy was supposed to mean without fluids in his head, nor what a head should be, or how it could contain fluids, or how those fluids could pound, pound, pound, from the tiniest human hammer, translating the mess of noise into pure-tones, or how Sam could be Sam at all, when stained-glass churches and spanish moss apparently didn’t exist with him—

 _Stained glass windows, a cold planetarium full of empty seats, light shining in dark places, a barrette at the end of his sisters hair—_ Suddenly there was a ground and Sam had the feet to stand on it.

He was breathing and knew what beautiful things were.

“How’d you do that so quickly?” a voice asked.

Sam startled. A very strange looking creature stood before him, a surly teenage Ent, if Sam’s senses were to be believed. It took a moment for the flash of memory to work its way through his head, but once it did, Sam’s gaze sharpened. He remembered the creature from above, standing next to a heavily armed racoon, fighting Thanos’s army. 

“Do what?” he asked, a more polite reaction than his instinctive, _What the hell?_

“Manifest,” the tree-person replied, waving his branch-arm at Sam’s body.

Sam glanced down at himself to double check his physicality and tried to be surprised at the strange shimmery tunic and pants that gracefully dripped off his form his equally shimmery and starry form. But so far surprise was an emotion truly eluding him. He stood up straight.

“I—” he started, frowning, “…I don’t know?”

“I mean,” the tree continued. “I manifested automatically because I’m used to this sort of thing. My species, like, is very flexible about having to grow new bodies and all.”

“Congratulations,” Sam said, discovering irritation.

“But your species isn’t good at stuff like this,” the tree continued. “You’re too…” He wavered a hand from side to side and scrunched up his face. “Soul-less?”

Sam stared for second and then laughed. Or cried. His body was unable to distinguish. 

“Well, you’re not going to tell me how you did it?” Tree-man insisted over Sam’s guffaws.

Sam wasn’t trying to dismiss the conversation so he said, “I don’t know, man. I just—”

The tree-dude gestured ‘go on’ in that perfect impatient way that reminded Sam so much of talking with his sister while she tried to get the family gossip out of him (he had an open face and everyone trusted him with their secrets). Sam took a moment to breathe.“I thought of my sister’s hair, I guess,” Sam said, looking down at his hands, glassy and reflecting the stars and orbs floating on the silent air. He flexed them, hoping to feel a pull of muscle, a pulse of blood.

“That’s so fucking weird,” the tree said. He rolled his eyes and muttered, more to himself than to Sam, “Wish rocket were here to translate the weirdness.”

“Weirdness, yeah,” Sam chuckled bitterly, flexing his empty hands. “I’m talking to an Ent.”

“I am Groot,” the tree-dude said indignantly.

“Alright, Groot,” Sam said, meeting Groot’s brown-eyed gaze. “If you know so much, can you explain where we are?”

Groot twirled around and said with fake-cheer, “A Fucking Tesseract!”

~

  
Nebula helped get Tony back to Earth within two weeks of Thanos’s snap. They didn’t say more than two words to each other the entire way back, but Tony for once understood what someone else was thinking, as clearly as if he was thinking it himself. They had spent the trip contacting various friends and family, or trying to at least, confirming that, yes, actually, Thanos really did commit a cosmic crime and yes, he really did get away with it. 

When they arrived in Wakanda (there was no reason to go back to New York, not for Tony), Nebula had gone to Princess Shuri’s lab and shut herself off, as if going into sleep mode, to try to reorganize her universe without her sister in it. Tony had collapsed into a hug with Banner, crying weakly into his shoulder, “Guess we all know how Obi Wan felt, I guess.”

As Tony was not immediately struck down on the spot for uncalled for irreverence, he assumed that as far as greater powers went, Thanos was probably it. 

It didn’t take long for General Okoye to gather the remaining Avengers in a council room and ask the one question no one felt the capacity to ask: What do we do now?

That’s when Tony met Carol Danvers. 

~

Carol kept her hands clenched behind her back, around Maria’s old dog tags, holding the soreness of that loss between her shoulder blades and allowing it to go nowhere else. After years of the sort of training and practice required to control an almost limitless power contained in her body, Carol knew how to circumnavigate pain in order to problem-solve. What she didn’t know how to do was be someone else’s strength when hers had been robbed from her so swiftly, breaking every promise she had ever made to fate and every promise she assumed fate would keep to her. She had paid her dues for decades, Maria had paid hers—the clearest indication of a broken reality was a house in Louisiana, empty now even of the muggy southern heat. 

The Avengers all looked at her now the way Monica had looked, sitting on her mother’s doorstep, holding her mother’s grandchild, watching Carol explode inside her own skin on the front pavement.

Tony Stark looked crazy but tired, the spies were blank and waiting for orders, the Rocket Racoon was steaming and desperate—a room full of scientists and soldiers, recalculating existence together. 

“So,” Scott said, his eyebrow twitching in time with the pen he was clicking, “Just to clarify, again, but what you’re saying is that Thanos sucked half of the living universe into the yellow gem-thingy on his magic-glove, a gem-thingy he only has because he killed someone he loves…”

“Yes…” Carol said, trying to keep her voice kind and soft, stifling the smallest of cringes. “I know this is absurd and hard to swallow in the face of, well, extreme catastrophe, but that is the truth, so far as I can understand it.”

“Absurd,” Tony scoffed. “Listen, lady, we’ve all seen and been through a lot of weird-shit. You wanna get on our level, get on our level, but don’t lecture—”

“Tony,” Rhodey snapped off wearily. “No one’s lecturing anyone, stand-down, would you?”

Carol felt ready to start in on the lecture she was being accused of giving but a quick glance at Rogers, who was shaking his head, cut her off. He was paying close attention to her, despite his spot in the corner, standing away from the table with General Okoye who stood protectively over Princess Shuri. He had yet to say a word as they recounted the events of the past month. But something was solid in his eyes, something that was hard to land on with everyone else but easy to find in him. He was ready to respond. 

~

Steve admired Captain Marvel’s patience in the face of several very lost heroes and baffled scientists. If he looked closely at her, he could see the remnants of fire radiating under her skin. He was ready to cede everything he had to her leadership. 

“Why?” Okoye asked Marvel--the million-dollar question. “I don’t understand why someone would do this.”

Maybe Okoye wouldn’t, her mind and heart so disciplined and bright, that her anger was normally sharp, and rarely reckless or misleading. Why would a leader like Okoye fathom even the imagined logic of Thanos the Disease. And now Steve wanted to lend something to Okoye as well, the General, give her his shield, his allegiance, his hands, something to make this world worthy of how hard she tried. 

Steve thought maybe he sympathized with her perspective and the way she effortlessly tore down all the bullshit that challenged her loyalty. But Steve was never really loyal to something so physical as she—not country and barely cause. Steve would burn bridges without hesitation.

He had no real loyal love for the world. No, he had loyal enemies. Pain being the first one on that list.

And what a wound, what a pain, had Thanos delivered to existence itself.

“He wanted peace,” Banner said, shivering under his pile of blankets while Thor ran a hand down his back. His fraught relationship with Hulk was taking a toll on his body in a lot of unpredictable ways. Today he had a fever. “Something— something about ending suffering.”

“Fucked up way to go about it,” Rocket said, the lone soul in the room who still had energy to voice righteous anger.

“He’s done it before,” Thor whispered.

“Course he’s done it before, the maniac,” Rocket said. “Had to test his dumb-as-shit theories out, didn’t he, the punk-ass purple piece of mother-fucking slime.”

“Did it work?” Scott asked, a little awed and a little confused, still taking notes in his little moleskin.

“No!” Rocket said, leaping up. “No, what the fuck do you think happened, huh? I know you all aren’t strangers to genocide here, so what the fuck do you think happened—on those planets when a— a—a maniacal freak comes to rescue them by slaughtering half the population?”

Scott shrugged and looked down.

“But why?” Okoye asked again. “Why—”She cut herself off. “Never mind,” she said, eyes downcast but determined. “There is no reason for genocide. If there was, I wouldn’t want to learn it.”

“He didn’t even love Gamora!” Nebula burst out, brokenly and loudly and full of so much empty bravado. “How—?”

“Love isn’t pure,” Marvel interrupted, her own anger bleeding through. “It’s a force that can be manipulated. I assume he already had the reality stone. I assume the soul stone’s guardian does not actually understand his task. I assume there’s an explanation, because—well, because even though the universe does not ask the permission of justice, it is not forsaken of laws.”

“What, like laws against carving a great big ‘fuck you’ into the space-time continuum?” Rocket asked, “Because it sure would be nice if there were laws against that!”

“Maybe it’s because Thanos had a point,” Tony said, dropping his head onto the back of the sofa.

Marvel clearly had to bite her tongue, but everyone else didn't bother.

“How dare you?” Nebula asked roughly and full of hot-poison.

“Go fuck yourself, Stark,” Shuri said quietly and viciously.

“Stark, you cross a line,” Thor warned while Rocket cursed, and Rhodey, Clint, Natasha all sighed, “Tony.”

“Well, listen,” Tony continued, struggling but persisting, “What was his goal? To solve _scarcity_?”

“You do not understand what you are talking about,” Thor started but Tony interrupted.

“Maybe he got the soul-stone because his logic wasn’t all that damnable to begin with. I disagree with his methods, obviously,” he took in a breath and closed his eyes, pushing some madness below the surface, “But maybe trying to prevent starvation in the entire Universe isn’t bad enough for this to be a totally righteous fight? Maybe we need to think about the gray areas if we want to get back everyone we—”

Tony stopped, appearing unable to finish.

While he was talking, Steve had retreated to a small moment in his head, his internal-vision melting Wakanda and the teary-faced heroes and geniuses in the room away, and he remembered something so clearly in his head that he forgot his depthless grief in that space of a second.

_“Steven Grant, if you ever think that your precious God-ordained life is a burden, then you take it up with Him. There are people on this earth that are burdens, Steven, but you and I and the Good Lord know they live in Manhattan and say their prayers in a Bank.”_

When he came back to the somber room, where everyone was glaring at Tony for saying what they didn’t want to hear said and Thor was sparking with so much frustration, Steve could smell ozone, he spoke up for the first time in days.

“Tony, you are monumentally fucking stupid.”

Everyone in the room whipped around to the corner into which Steve had squeezed himself. Thor, Clint, Natasha, and Banner all rolled their eyes seemingly on instinct. Steve could hear the echo of Thor’s condemnation on that helicarrier so long ago ( _Petty humans._ )

Tony played his role, too. “Just because you don’t like something, Cap,” He started, always against Steve, a principle of their small inclusive society, “Just because it doesn’t hold up to your standards of perfection, Mr. Black-and-White, doesn’t mean—”

Steve cut him off.

“Thanos is telling the same bull-shit story maniacs like him have been telling throughout history,” Steve said, watching as Tony’s eyes flicker down under Steve’s glare. “He’s playing god with the world’s resources. You don’t solve scarcity with genocide, Christ-Almighty. You don’t fix scarcity and starvation by getting rid of _people_.”

“Oh, perfect,” Tony threw his hands in the air, launching to his feet. “Great, well, let’s just track him down, right, shove _Das Kapital_ under his nose, maybe he’ll snap his fingers and turn the universe into a commune instead—”

“There are no solutions to the world’s problems that can be executed by snapping fingers, Tony!” Steve said, feeling a phantom ache in his spine, a heaviness in his chest, a frailty in his breath, and all the pain that had been piled onto him from the moment he was born, from the moment he realized he would have to philosophically justify his broken-bodied existence, “Thanos’s lack of imagination and his delusions of grandeur are not anything approaching righteousness. They are the actions of a power-hungry, fascist, and extremely dimwitted monster.”

Tony clenched his fists and opened his mouth, but no argument came forth. 

“Captain Rogers is right,” Marvel said. “If we approach this situation with the assumption that the Infinity Stones are not all powerful and all knowing, then we can strategize a way to subvert Thanos’s will. And reverse the evil he has done. The stones are powerful, yes, but—” she paused, disappearing into her head for one second of grief, before continuing, “but nothing is infinite. That’s not the way the universe works.”

Scott’s eyes flickered back and forth between Steve and Marvel before he raised his hand.

“I’ve got something that might help,” he said. “Well, it might restart the Big Bang entropic process all over again and wipe away existence as we know it, but, well, it could also help.”


	2. Chapter 2

“A Tesseract?” Sam said. “What, like the one Steve flew into the Atlantic Ocean?”

“Steve?” Groot asked, “The bearded man? I met him. He’s nice.”

“Right,” Sam said, feeling his heart shift into dullness underneath his shimmering form. _Oh_ _,_ he remembered, _Steve?_. “But back to the Tesseract.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what the shit you’re talking about, but it sounds like a lot of the drama a stone would cause.”

“Stone? Wait, you mean the Tesseract was an infinity stone?” Sam asked. He glanced around and put it together. “Are we in one those stones right now?”

“Duh,” Groot said, gesturing at everything around them.

 _Huh_.Sam glanced around again and his surroundings grew more into focus. There was a collection of golden lights dancing through the air like fireflies, and the crystal dome above his head appeared to be reshaping itself every second, finding new crystalline patterns to tessellate. It reminded him briefly of a math class he took in college where the professor made them watch a video on fractals for a solid mind-numbing ten minutes.

“So,” Sam said softly, catching one of the small golden lights on his finger. “Thanos won.”

Groot’s surliness melted away and he collapsed on the ground in a puff of bright dust.

“Yeah, he did,” Groot said. “The pirate-angel must have failed.”

Before Sam could figure that one out, the golden light on his finger began to burn. He shook his hand quickly on instinct and as the light fell to the ground it grew brighter and heavier and soon Sam was looking down not at a light but at a teenage boy with wide teary eyes.

“Wha—,” the boy said, blinking rapidly.

“I am Groot,” Groot replied helpfully.

The boy scrambled to his feet and carefully watched Sam and Groot as they carefully watched him.

“I’m Peter?” he said.

“Are you sure?” Sam couldn’t help but ask.

“No?” Peter mumbled, “No, wait, yes.” He patted himself down sending sparks of golden powder into the air, like shaking dust out of a rug.

“Who are you?” He asked warily.

“Sam,” Sam said, sending Groot a look from his place on the ground. “If you’re wandering where we are or how we got here, ask him.”

“An Ent?” Peter whispered to Sam nervously.

“What the fuck is an Ent?” Groot asked. “I am Groot.”

“So either not a dream or an extremely weird dream,” Peter concluded with all the dire drama of a fifteen year old. Or twelve year old. _How old was he?_

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Sam asked.  

Peter gave him a strangled sort of look before saying, “My answer to that doesn’t make this seem like less of a dream.”

Sam rolled his eyes and sat down on the ground next to Groot.

“Okay, dude,” Sam said quietly, “Cope how you need to. Me and Groot will let you know when we think of a way out of here.”

Peter nodded solemnly at this, like Sam was being serious, and Sam resisted the urge flick his ankle.  

“We are dead, though,” Groot said in the same quiet tone. “There is no way out. There is not fucking soil.”

Sam, suspecting he was in the company of two vulnerable teenagers, swallowed the beginnings of a profound and hopeless misery and allowed Groot’s question to provoke a feeling of near-curiosity.

“No fucking soil, huh,” Sam asked, wrapping his arms around Groot's bony-looking shoulders. He was warmer than Sam expected. Groot was not starry like Sam and Peter—he was the color and shape of tree, brown and earthy and possessing a surreally actualized presence compared the rest of the Tesseract’s interior. _What did he say_ , Sam thought, _about being used to growing a body_? 

Maybe because Sam was aware but not aware enough to be hindered by something as trivial as superficial logic; he thought, in an almost physical way, about how a tree simply could not exist without some dirt. _Roots, fine and cold and white against the rich dark earth,_ he mused, touching the tips of his fingers to the ground by his feet, _Where is the soul of a tree?_

Sam ran his hand along the shimmery glass-like starry ground. He hummed an old song under his breath that his grandfather would sing as he gardened. Slowly, like watching a bag of popcorn pop, it shimmered into a familiar texture. A bright smell sprung across the space between the three of them and Sam was able to scoop up a handful of cool, healthy dirt and lob it at Groot’s forlorn head. Groot stared in awe for a tight three seconds before plunging his hands into the ground in front of him, curling his roots into the sparkly-planetarium-crystallized earth.

“Tastes like,” Groot said. “Tastes like chocolate pudding.”

“Alright,” said Sam, who thought at this point he was adapting pretty well to being inside a yellow rock.

Peter dropped back to the ground on his knees and thrust a finger in Sam’s face.“I know you!”

“We did just meet, but I’m guessing that’s not what you mean.”

“You’re Captain America’s friend! You’re one of the criminals I fought in Germany!”

Sam blinked at him and the crystalline edges to their small reality blurred. His head ached and he clenched every muscle in his body. Of all the people to meet in a Tesseract after the defeat of the universe, the child he had fought in one of the stupidest fights of his life.

“Christ, little-dude,” Sam said to Peter, “First dreams now criminals. Let it go. That shit don’t exist no more. Neither do we.”

The blurriness faded but Sam wished it might come back.

“Oh, good, two of you are here already,” said a third voice.

Sam jumped up from the ground to face what he could only understand as a green glowing ghost with an unattractive goatee and a couple of raised eyebrows.

“There are three of us,” Sam said slowly to the green ghost.

“Fuck you, too,” Groot said, making a rude gesture at the ghost.

“Dr. Strange just got stranger,” Peter muttered.

Dr. Strange The Green Ghost blinked his ghost eyes and then said, “Maybe I’ve made a mistake here.”

“Congratulations!” Groot shouted, throwing a bunch of tiny leaves into the air, happy now that he got to munch on some dirt.  
 

Sam looked up as the leaves floated onto his face and the utterly disparate way they sat framed in the nebula-crystal sky, like delicate leafy stars among the oldest and hottest and most poisonous gases to ever explode in the void—he found himself blinking back tears.

_“Every poor kid in my neighborhood imagined this as the promise-land,” Steve said. His hands on the railing were purple and white. Sam didn’t have the capacity to respond. He understood, a little. The Grand Canyon had never called him though. Dry places, cold places, never—he grew up in New Orleans. His grandmother, who lived outside it, her grandmother pushed out of the city long before, she sang old cajun songs to him and made dragonflies hovering over the uninhabitable and sticky swamp skip across his mind’s eye._

_But he knew how the justice of the world beyond the city gripped any hungry kid’s imagination, how imagining a beautiful earth made a sidewalk seem powerless.The un-reality of the view, picture perfect, the hyper-reality of the canyon, everything this earth should be allowed to be: Sam had to touch the top of Steve’s cool hand to believe himself._

“So you can't keep doing that, unfortunately,” Dr. Strange said, placing his ghost-hands on his ghost-hips. “It’ll make it too hard for me to manipulate this plane.”

“Well, that’s cryptic,” Sam said, closing his eyes.

Peter snorted and said, “Yeah, he’s a cryptic weirdo. You don’t get used to it.”

“I mean,” Strange said, “that if there are too many competing signals in the stone, we’ll become collectively incoherent. If your friends, your avengers, are going to figure out how to get you out, they need a coherent signal.”

Sam decided not to parse that.

“Why are you green?” Groot asked, evidently agreeing with Sam.

Strange glanced sideways at Groot and said, “This is how I manifested.”

“Fucking obviously,” Groot said cheerfully.

“I’m sorry, but who even are you?” Strange asked, turning to him more fully.

“Groot,” Groot, Peter, and Sam all said.

Strange looked like he was about to start lecturing but Peter jumped in, pushing into Groot’s space.

“Hey, I got a few questions man, one alien species to another. Where are you from?” Peter asked, holding his hands together in front of his chest. “Like, how many light-years away from earth? What’s your planet like? How many suns are there? Do you know anything about Starfleet, maybe?”

Groot shrugged while Strange rolled his eyes.“I have a better question, actually,” Strange said. “Why are you here? I only saw two people manifest, not two people and a tree.”

“Trees are people,” Peter protested.

Groot threw another burst of leaves over Peter’s head.

“Congratulations!”

Sam sat down on the starry ground hard, remembering something from only minutes before, seeing it finally compute in his head.

_So Thanos won?_

“Did Steve—” he tried to ask. Flashes of everyone he had ever loved wove themselves into the matrix of geometric lines on the ground. He lost the ability to want to know what he wanted to know, but still the thought of Steve, his sad eyes, his weirdly broken body—there was someone hanging onto Sam’s crystalline ribs, weeping.

Dr. Strange sighed while Peter looked on in confusion.“Look, I don’t know exactly who vanished in Thanos’s snap,” he said, the edges of kindness in his calm voice. “I’m pretty sure it was all arbitrary, but for what it’s worth, if Captain America had vanished, I would’ve known.”

Sam felt cold relief with that news, and sillier for wishing Steve was with him anyway, and then colder again--

“I am a criminal, too,” Groot said, leaning his woody shoulder into Sam’s side.

“I ain’t a criminal,” Sam said, knowing that responding to that non-sequitur was far easier than responding to a finality beyond the reach of Steve.

“Eh,” Groot said. “Rocket says that criminals are just people who don’t roll over when rich people say so.”

Sam laughed, leaning against Groot, letting the competing memories wash over him. His sister wearing pants to prom, his grandfather reprimanding a baby gator, Riley flipping off their CO, Steve saluting without a parachute—

_“Wait, let me get this straight, how many times were you arrested?”_

_“It’s actually not relevant.”_

_“Okay, comrade. Whatever you say.”_

“I told you to stop,” Strange said. “If your personhood gets too strong, Thanos will notice—”

“Why green?” Groot asked over him.

“Maybe because he’s a wizard,” Peter said, tilting back from his knees to his bottom. He leaned back on his hands and looked up at Strange upside down. “Green is a wizardy color, right?”

“No,” Groot said. “Wizards don’t exist. But green does.”

“Good point,” Peter said. “Hey,” he turned to Sam. “Why aren’t you a criminal? I thought you were a criminal. Like, that’s what we were fighting about, I’m pretty sure.”

“Everyone needs to listen to me, now!” Strange shouted.

“Hey, look, another person!” Peter shouted.

Groot shot off leaves into the air like flare while Strange slapped his palm to his forehead.

~

“Ok,” Tony said. “I’m gonna be the first to admit it so none of you get the chance, but I’m not smart enough for this.”

Scott schooled his face rapidly from heartbroken to hopeful as he turned to Shuri.

“This is barely science,” she said, voice only just above a whisper. “This is…so abstract.”

She sounded pained, her arms wrapped around her knees, and Scott felt such a visceral longing for his own child he nearly threw up.

“Ok,” Scott said, “but consider this: we’ve all met someone who can control lightning with their mind. And his brother is like a witch or something.”

Shuri winced.

Tony let out a sound that might’ve been a laugh but definitely wasn’t.

“A witch,” he said, rubbing his hand down his face. “A witch, ok.” He chuckled so dryly it was a cough. “A witch, some aliens, and an atom bomb drive through the Lincoln Tunnel. They wanna catch a _show…_ ”

Shuri clutched either side of her head and said with wide eyes, “Whatever Thor is, or his brother, they only seem magical because we don’t understand them. We’re not from their part of the universe. Which is why we can’t do or build what you’re asking. Because we’re just not part of that universe.”

“This is getting too philosophical,” Scott replied. “Or geographical. I can’t tell.” He took a breath to control the shaking in his chest and hoisted himself up onto the table behind him.

The sun was setting. So that was nice.

Wakanda’s forcefield acted as a sort of prism in the mornings and evenings, when the angle of the sun’s rays struck the intricate projection, splattering rich colors into the air. It was hardly more than an extra vibrancy from the ground, but Scott knew that in the Council room, hanging above the capital city, where they had all sat bereaved and broken yesterday morning, the full spectrum dripped down the walls.

It reminded him of a prism he had dangled from the window in Cassie’s hospital room after her first operation. She had thought the small rainbow’s bouncing across her bed and the crisp floor (and even her arms!) were fairies.

In Shuri’s labs, the colors were all there, but soft. She had rigged a series of mirrors and actual prisms to let the light in so that the most luminous moment of the morning and evening were the exact moment of sunrise and sunset—the bright beginning and end.

Scott sat on the table, shivering, Shuri sat curled in a chair, her braids hiding most of her body from view, and Tony leant against the glass beyond which lay the shimmering vibranium mines under the mountain.

“ _This_ has to mean something,” Scott choked out, waving his arms at the lab that was happily bathing in every color imaginable. “Thanos can’t have decided against this—”

“Do rainbows count as a resource?” Tony asked, running a hand down the side of his neck. “Did he snap half of rainbows out of existence? Would it matter? Is that how light works? Is that how _life_ works?” 

Shuri laughed wetly and said, “The question of utility is just always going to be a burden on us, isn’t it? My brother had to struggle with it and now so do I.”

“Let’s ignore it, then,” Tony replied in a monotone. “I’m fresh out of ways to answer it.”

Shuri uncurled and placed her feet back on the ground, resting her elbows on her knees. She twisted her beads around her wrist, looking thoughtfully at them while she said, “My brother once told me something. Or tried to tell me. He was always so much better at the abstract, you know. Philosophy and things. He took a few classes on the philosophy of the western world, and he told me, ‘Shuri, it’s amazing what they accomplished when they were so wrong about so much. Enlightenment, more like de-lightenment!’”

She paused, smiling to herself, “He was kind of dork.”

“What were we wrong about?” Scott asked.

“Subjectivity,” she said, frowning at her hands. “Objectivity. I didn’t really get it then and I don’t really get it now. Engineers are supposed to be the 'subject' that can build and fix the 'object.' But T’Challa told me that it was different, that it had to be different, here. There is no individual subject. It is a community. Something like that.”

She shook her head out of her reverie and looked up at Scott and Tony.

“It’s a question of our relationship to the world,” Shuri said. “How we try to live in it.”

She gestured to the rainbow embodied so physically in the room Scott could almost taste it.

~

Nakia was falling.Peace was not something she had expected when she died. She was all about the doom and gloom of a vast and empty destiny-beyond-the-grave. She didn’t expect peace, and she certainly didn’t expect punishment, but now she was surprised because what she saw before her was not the cold void she had counted on.

No, here she was, peacefully falling into a prism.

Maybe.

This didn’t make any sense.

Falling is terrifying, right? From a height like this?, She thought. Why is it terrifying again?

 _Smushed organs, broken bones, brains leaking onto the hard ground_ —Nakia abruptly pulled her thoughts into one singular focus, feeling much the same as she did when her cat was trapped under that tree when she was little and if she only put all her mind and all her effort into lifting that branch, she could save her precious kitten.

“I have a body,” she said with a mouth and throat and lungs.

She stopped falling and her feet gently touched the glass of the starry ground.When she glanced up she saw a cloud of leaves float along the edge of the horizon.

  
~

“Okay, I don’t think the plan is going to work with four of you,” Strange said, rubbing the corner of his left eyebrow. “Two of you need to un-manifest, now.”

“Um, no?” Nakia said.

“What exactly is the plan, oh goatee-ed one?” Sam asked.

“It’s incredibly complicated, ok?” Strange said, running a hand through his weirdly styled hair. “There are a lot things up in the air right now and if I don’t calculate this exactly right, we won’t be able to defeat Thanos.”

“You have a plan to defeat Thanos,” Nakia repeated back to him. “From inside this magical rock.”

“Wait, I thought your plan already failed?” Peter jumped in, looking every bit the worried, out-of-his-depth teenager he was. “Like, on Titan, we didn’t stop him.”

“I foresaw that, actually,” Strange said, mostly to himself as he frowned in concentration at the starry ground. “It was actually just step one to the only outcome out of them all that showed us winning…”

“You foresaw it?” Nakia asked, crossing her arms and raising her voice. “It is well past time for you to stop speaking in riddles.”

“Hell yeah,” Sam muttered.

“Hell fucking yeah,” Groot shouted.

“Yes I foresaw it! I looked into the future and saw 14 million futures and out of 14 million, there was one outcome where we defeated Thanos,” Strange said as he held his hands on his hips, like a passionate professor to a misbehaving class. “And already we are on the wrong path—there should only be two of you—Wilson and Barnes.”

“Ok,” Sam said, completely losing his patience. “But why?”

“The stones!” Strange said, holding his hands out in a _see!?_ sort of gesture. “It’s all about the stones. Power, Mind, Reality, Soul, Space and Time—the six singularities of the abstract realm. The Elements of our Existence. The Be All and End All of everything we know. Thanos has all of them. Our fates were sealed the moment he figured out how to get the Soul stone. But however powerful he is now, he still has one weakness.”

“And you know what that weakness is?” Nakia asked.

“Yes,” Strange said, clearly relieved that someone was paying attention. (Sam rolled his eyes.) “I went into the Time stone, as I was its guardian, and I saw one path out of fourteen million that would lead to his defeat.”

Nakia said, “Well are you going to explain this path or not?”

“He doesn’t deserve to possess the Soul stone,” Strange said. “The sacrifice he made, it was almost not enough. You see, the Stones will each do your bidding if you possess them, but the Soul stone judges first.”

“Bullshit,” Groot said, leaping to his root-feet.

“He loved enough,” Strange snapped, avoiding Groot’s glare.

“What is this judgement?” Nakia asked over Groot’s cussing, her eyes piercing. “How does this rock judge you?”

“It asks you to sacrifice something that you truly love,” Strange replied, eyes downcast.

“Fuck off!” Groot said. “Truly love? Fuck off! He used her—he killed her!”

“It worked, Groot,” Strange said, almost apologetically. “It was enough.”

Sam marveled at the heavy air between them all, contrary to so strict a peaceful surrounding. He placed a hand on Groot’s quivering shoulder and squeezed, hoping the pressure would remind the little tree that they weren’t actually in a freefall, or a freaky spacewalk with no up or no down.

 _Always gotta know where the ground is,_ Sam thought somewhat hysterically.

Sam couldn’t begin to explain where the ground was now, but if he had to venture a wild guess, it was somewhere in between Groot’s fury and Strange’s regret.

“Love isn’t a quantity,” Nakia finally said matter-of-factly. “You don’t measure it. The stone must have made a mistake.”

Strange blinked at her.“The stones don’t make mistakes…” Strange started. “Haven’t you been listen—”

“What’s your plan?” Peter interrupted. “What was the one outcome that worked?”

Strange sighed and said, “We have to make the stone make another judgement. Thanos was enough but there is someone who can offer better. Who can overwhelm the stone. And break the power that Thanos wields with it.”

“You mean, someone to make a bigger sacrifice that what they truly love?” Peter asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Someone who loved more, better, bigger, and with less self-interest,” Strange said, his eyes finding Sam’s as Sam worked it out. “Someone who’s done this sort of thing before, with great success.”

Sam would’ve asked “who” if he didn’t already know.

~

While Tony, Shuri, and Scott engineered something more powerful than a singularity, Carol, Thor, Steve and Okoye strategized the war. Almost as soon as they decided they would fight him and his army once more, Carol sent Nebula and Rocket to track him down, do general reconnaissance, and Thor and Banner to recruit thinkers and warriors to the cause. 

“Earth cannot fight alone,” Thor had said as they said their goodbyes on the tarmac. “The Valkyrie are out there, and others too, besides Asgardians,” he shuttered as he plucked at the blade of his hammer. 

“Great philosophers, as well,” Okoye said pointedly, her mind ever present on Shuri. 

Thor smiled bitterly and replied, “Yes, of course—perhaps I shall find the makers of the bridge. We’ll bring everyone home, easy.” 

Steve grinned like someone was pulling on the corners of his mouth with fishing hooks. Going home was about as elusive a concept as it got for him, the Man Out of Time. 

“Steven,” Thor said, then, twisting back to somber rapidly. “I want you to have this.” 

He held out Stormbreaker.

“You will need it more than I,” he said. 

Steve didn’t reach for it but it didn’t matter—Thor tossed it to him and he caught it on instinct. It weighed about the same as his shield. 

“I made it to kill Thanos,” Thor said. “Don’t miss.”

And before Steve could protest the gift, Thor and Banner had skipped aboard their ship and disappeared into the depths of the galaxy.

Steve, Okoye, and Marvel were left to plan the fight against an unbeatable opponent with nearly all the power in their universe’s existence. 

“He has one great disadvantage,” Okoye said one night. “He thinks he’s already won."

~

“Captain America is going to lead the Avengers in an assault on Thanos,” Strange explained slowly, pretending Sam couldn’t put it all together himself. “This much was clear in my visions. When he sacrifices himself for everyone in here, including Wilson and Barnes, the Soul Stone will yield and Thanos’s power will no longer be loyal to just him. Such a sacrifice will baffle Thanos, of course, as he is simply too evil to comprehend that kind of loyalty and love, but it will also give me a chance to slip under his defenses and take back the Time Stone as well.”

~

“When we break the Soul Stone, we break his power,” Shuri finished, her chin tilted up and her hands tensed at her sides. Everyone in the council room was still squinting at the board situated between Tony, Scott, and Marvel. “Not because he has any sort of legitimate power, but because singularities don’t exactly bow to will. They only bow to entropy. So we have to allow entropy access to the void where the singularities live.”

“I’m sorry,” M’Baku asked. “But how does that work? Are we trying to build a wormhole? Is the goal here to find a way across an event horizon?”

“No,” Scott jumped in. “Cause that would be impossible. We’d all die.”

“Painfully,” Tony muttered.

“Yes,” Scott said. “Painfully. Being stretched out too much. Literally impossible.”

“So how are we even going to get close to these singularities?” Banner asked from a computer screen—he was orbiting a planet near Gamora’s home world, chasing down leads for the last of the Valkyrie. “And when we access them, how are we supposed to survive the sudden existence of six black holes?”

“We go smaller,” Scott proclaimed. 

“We have to break open the gems to release Space, Time, Consciousness, Light, the Continuum or Perception, and Soul—but to break open the gems we have to crack them at their atomic level,” Shuri explained. “And at the atomic level, these ‘singularities’ are simply the laws of physics.”

“The stones themselves are Tesseracts,” Tony explained. “Tesseracts are the only structures able to contain things as abstract as the entire concept of Consciousness—so we engineer another Tesseract. One that we can walk across. One that will disperse the concentration within the stones.”

“They react differently with matter, especially on the atomic level,” Shuri said. “If we can manipulate the matter to redirect, to stop collapsing in on itself as singularities do, we can re-introduce all the matter of these singularities back into our universe. And release whatever power Thanos has because of them.”

“And release half the universe’s souls,” Marvel concluded. 

“And how,” A’Kane, a stoic Wakandan chemical engineer recently returned home from her research on Mars, “How exactly, pray tell, do you plan on building a Tesseract. Do you have the blueprints, maybe? Or, I don’t know, a recipe?”

“Oh yeah,” Tony said. “Betty Crocker. Comes in a box.”

~

“The Avengers will fight,” Strange said. “Captain America will do what he does best. We will be released from the Soul Stone. We will fight Thanos. I will reclaim the Time Stone. And we will win.”

Sam punched him.

~

Okoye stood, gaze on the blurred void rushing past the starship. Wakandans had been traveling the solar system for centuries, but Okoye was the first of her family, the first of her clan, to make the leap to astronaut. The River clan and the people of Wakanda’s cities, Nakia’s people and Shuri’s people, they were the star-sailors, by their own reckoning of priorities.Nakia had nearly gone to a moon of Jupiter, once. She had promised to bring back a crystal for Okoye’s sister before her accident. When it was too late for that promise to matter, Nakia backed out of the exploratory mission and took the plunge to complete her undercover training. Now Okoye stood on deck, sturdy and heartbroken, traveling through heaps of spacetime, seeing stars Nakia would have laughed in delight to witness.Okoye breathed through the echo of her regret.

Footsteps behind her and a familiar smell of ozone alerted her to Thor's presence. Thor and Banner had recently met up with them on their way across the galaxy to challenge Thanos, bringing with them in their wake a team of thinkers and a company of alien warriors, all smarting from the sting of loss, still so sharp after a year and a half since the snap.

“She found the Valkyrie,” Thor said as he walked up to stand beside her. “My friend, she found the remaining Valkyrie.”

 _The Alien Dora Milaje,_ Okoye thought, amused despite herself. When Thor has come aboard the Wakandan starship, he had been waiting on news from his friend who helped him defeat a death-goddess of sorts. She turned to him and met his shining eyes. He was crying, his arms folded across his chest protectively, perfectly miserable yet joyous.

“She found you,” Okoye said. “She found her ancient companions. We may yet have chance to win this ridiculous fight after all.”

Thor chuckled through his tears and wiped his cheeks.“Even without our bridge, she found them,” Thor said, turning his gaze to window. “No matter where any Asgardian went, we could just ride the bridge back home. It’s been hard imagining a way to find each other without the Bifröst—but she did it.”

He shrugged to stop himself from throwing his fists up in victory.

“Like Dorothy’s shoes,” Okoye mused, a stunning vision of red lighting up her mind. “

The Wizard of Oz?” Thor asked gingerly. “I think I may have actually seen that one.”

Okoye shook her head against the press of bewilderment.

“It is one of the few American films I have seen myself,” she said. “It was beautiful to look at, from what I remember.”

Thor grinned a little wildly.

“Our bridge was like that, I think,” he said. “There’s no place like home, correct? A simple sentiment and a simple story. Asgardian stories were much bloodier.”

“On the Border Lands of Wakanda, our stories were more complicated,” Okoye replied. “Many of them were told for the explicit purpose of riling someone else up, who would then have to respond with their own story. It was like trading philosophies. I much prefer our old songs.”

“Old songs? Do you not have any new songs?”

“Yes, we do, but I like the old,” Okoye said. “Not that I have anything against the experimental music happening in the musical conservatories. Or any of the popular music from the rest of the country. Or even the music from beyond our borders. I just mean…”

She trailed off, lost in the smear of stars on the viewport.

“It’s good to know where you came from,” Thor finished for her.Okoye looked down at her shoes, so bright against the steel floor.

“Something like that,” she said. “Something not quite like that. Maybe not ‘where,’ maybe ‘why.’ I don’t really know. I’m just traditional. Always have been.”

Thor shifted on his feet before twisting around so his back faced the expanse of warping space and his handsome smile faced her.

“The Valkyrie had this old battle song,” he said. “One of the warriors had been assigned guard-duty once, for me and my brother, and we begged her for nearly a week to sing the battle songs to us. She finally relented when my brother faked his own death.” He laughed and said under his breath, “That manipulative-- Anyway, so she relented and sang us this song and it was—”

He paused, eyes flicking upwards to look for the right word.

“Inspring?” Okoye guessed.

“Horrific, actually,” Thor said. “It was the ugliest, most terrifying thing I had ever heard in my young life. Gave me nightmares for months. Loki, my brother, loved it.”

Okoye tried to wrap her head around it all but promptly gave up and laughed.

“I can’t wait to meet your Valkyrie warriors,” she said. _I can’t wait to tell all of this to Nakia._

“They ride winged horses and wear silver and white armor, their long hair flowing free in the wind,” Thor said dreamily, waving his arm across an imaginary sky.

Okoye remembered so suddenly and with such clarity that it was more a strike to her sternum than a memory: Nakia riding up from the river, across the yellow grassy slopes, laughing, arms flown wide, strident against the dusty air.

She stood up straighter against the onslaught of the loss emptying out her chest, manufacturing hollowness where she should be filled with blood and flesh.

“A bridge, you said,” she whispered.Thor pulled out of his daydreams and said, “Yes. Like the one the princess is building. With Stark and Ant-Man. They asked me how the Bifröst worked. I told them, it works as long as there is someone there to turn the key. Someone on the other side.”

Okoye felt the pressure of Nakia’s hand in hers as the spaceship lurched across the galaxy’s endless night.


	3. Chapter 3

  
Dr. Stephen Strange became a surgeon for the sole purpose of finding a challenge worth his time. The nearly infinite variables combined with a precise routine made a perfect way to occupy one’s mind for the rest of one’s life, without any need to philosophize and depress himself. Perhaps he had made a mistake in treating this situation like an operating room. It is easy to get organs to cooperate. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Strange strained to say through gritted teeth. Not only had he just been punched in the un-reality of the Soul Stone, but it had hurt. It wasn’t supposed to hurt. He had the corporeal form of ghost, meaning he was completely fucking non-corporeal.

Wilson stood before him, his fist raised again, struggling with himself to not deliver another blow.

“That’s your plan, then, huh,” Wilson asked, fist slowly lowering and voice wavering between depth-less fury and heartbreak. “That’s your response…to this.” He gestured at the soul-space with a small twitch of his chin.

Strange was finding it difficult to respond to anything with his throbbing cheekbone.

“Alright, Mr. Falcon, sir,” the Parker kid said while Strange remained silent. He held his arms out and approached Wilson carefully. “Maybe he doesn’t mean, like, a permanent sacrifice?”

Parker sent Strange a wide-eyed glare.“You know, like how we’re not permanently dead right now?”

Wilson’s fury visibly crumbled into pity as Parker stumbled through comforting him.

“Peter,” he said, closing his eyes and tilting his face up. “I really don’t know what you think is going on here…”

Strange was near hysterical by how badly all of this was going.

“Can you please stop?” He asked Wilson; demanded. “You’ve already manifested too much, no need to do it to the kid.”

Peter bristled.“I’m not a kid,” he said out the side of his pout.

“I can’t stop doing something that you ain’t explaining, fucking wizard-man,” Sam said belligerently.

“I can’t explain! I’m literally not allowed!” Strange replied, indignantly. “Well, I wasn’t allowed before but I guess it’s too late now!”

Everyone waited expectantly, with varying degrees of curiosity and rage. Absolutely drowning in his own pettiness, Strange scowled right back.

“Do you think I want this?” Strange asked. “You think this was what I thought I was signing up for—trying to make the most of someone else’s sacrifice?”

Wilson flinched, but didn’t argue, and Nakia, who had been eyeing him warily, waiting for another burst of violence, softened her stance. She returned her attention to Strange and listened cooly while he continued. 

“This is worst case scenario, as far as I’m concerned,” Strange choked out, rubbing again at his sore cheek. “But we have a chance to save the entire universe. You haven’t seen what I have—what he could do—what he will do if we don’t stop him.”

“Enlighten us,” Nakia said, folding her arms. 

Strange shook his head, struggling against his memory of the fourteen million hells awaiting existence outside the Soul gem. His form shimmered, starting to reflect the soul stone’s lights rather than luminescing on its own. He’s been outside the Time Stone too long, outside his own body for even longer. His chance to help them was running out. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Strange said. “We have to fix this, now.”

“Fix what exactly?” Sam finally bit out. “Sounds like you don’t exactly need us.”

“I need _you_ ,” Strange said—his ghost-form regained some vibrancy. “Captain Rogers needs _you_. The Soul Stone needs to know _you’re_ here.”

“Okay, well, putting aside whatever the hell that means,” Sam said. “Why does me having a body mess with that?”

“Because I don’t exactly have a map of this place,” Strange answered, sharply. “Because there are lot of things I can manipulate, but a ‘physical’ presence in a non-physical place? No, not even a little bit.”

“You keep saying stuff like its obvious, dude,” Peter chimed in, from where he sat next to Groot, playing with Groots leaf buds. “None of us are Stone Guardians, or whatever you call it.”

“Why do you keep talking about the stone like it has a consciousness?” Nakia asked as Strange rolled his eyes. 

“Because it does,” Strange said. 

“Great,” Nakia said. “That clears it up. Also, why is a ‘physical’”— she bent her fingers into quotation marks—“presence hard to manipulate? All evidence from everywhere points to physical stuff being easier to handle than the non-physical.”

“Probably because we’re in a fucking Tesseract,” Groot supplied, twirling his over-grown fingers through a small cloud of soul-lights about twenty feet above their head.

Nakia’s eyebrows jumped.

“Oh,” she said with wonder. “A Tesseract.”

~

When Sam and Steve had camped out briefly in Wakanda, right after the betrayal of their team’s signatures on the Accords, Sam had fiddled around in a student lab, experimenting with vibranium and re-working old practice problems with the wondrous new axioms that the Wakandan thinkers had been secretly developing for hundreds of years. While Steve, Wanda, and Dr. Helen Cho caught up, preparing Bucky for his peaceful cryo-rest, Sam had retreated back to a time when he still felt curious about the earth. 

“You are an engineer, correct?” T’Challa asked, taking a break from his duties and hiding from his guard in the labs.

“Aerospace,” Sam said. “Mostly planes—never did get my chance to work with NASA.”

“Did you work on your own wings?” T’Challa said. 

“It was definitely a collaborative effort,” Sam said. “But because I was both engineer and test pilot, the FALCON program relied a lot on my know-how.”

“Test pilot?” 

“Yeah, you know, someone’s gotta fly the plane to prove it works. Fly the maneuver, test the air, test the mission—craziest people you’re ever gonna meet are test-pilots.” He wondered briefly if he should call Ms Maria (another crazy test-pilot) ask about Monica, let them know he was safe. 

“Do you miss it?” T’Challa asked. 

“Do you?” Sam volleyed back. 

~

“You know what a Tesseract is?” Strange asked, trying not to sound condescending but knowing he was failing in that regard. 

“Yes,” Nakia replied. “Part of the basic mathematics curriculum, where I grew up.”

“And I thought Calc was hard,” Peter muttered. 

“That is some weird math to be part of a basic curriculum,” Sam said, amused. 

“So what is it?” Peter asked. “A Tesseract?”

Nakia shrugged and looked up, pinching her face as she recalled. “If I am remembering this from my lessons correctly,” she said. “A Tesseract is a super-dimensional, or sub-dimensional, structure. Calculus is applicable, I think—but that’s pretty limited. If you wanted to get into the physics or chemistry of tesseract, just adding another dimension in some abstract calculation doesn’t really help. Especially since Tesseracts aren’t exactly extra-dimensional. They’re above or below, not a part of…”

“You saying we shouldn’t assume a spherical cow?” Sam asked, twisting around to take in the rolling landscape of sparkling fractals and bouncing globe orbs. 

“Dangerous to assume anything in here, I’m guessing,” Nakia replied.

“But, like,” Peter said, frowning. “This all looks like three-dimensions. Just a really trippy kind of three dimensions.”“That must be what Groot, your tree friend, is saying,” Nakia replied. 

“That’s what _I_ am saying,” Strange cut in. “This isn’t a physical realm—not in the same way we are physical.”

“And yet we are physical in it,” Nakia retorted. 

Strange managed to pull himself out of his pettiness.

_God, I’m so tired of this. I want to go home._

“Right,” he said, tersely. “Yes, that’s all correct. In a sense. Tip of the iceberg sort of correct-ness. Unfortunately, all my knowledge of Tesseracts comes from the Time Stone, which, while extremely complicated and un-wieldy, like all of the Stones, does not require a thorough understanding of all ontological theory.”

“Man, shut the hell up,” Wilson said, having now crawled down from his righteous fury (or having put it on the back-burner). “Ontological theory, my ass. You just gotta know the basics here. We don’t exist without bodies.”

“Yes,” Strange snapped. “I know that now, obviously. Well, it’s still up for debate, of course, considering this is a Tesseract and we’re all very much, still, you know, not alive—but clearly I miscalculated, or didn’t think I needed to calculate such an insane variable, because it would be just so simple to center your soul and so wildly difficuly to center your body--”

“Again,” Wilson said coldly yet mildly. “That’s just me.”

“I am well aware,” Strange shot back, rubbing his developing bruise. “I’ve definitely experienced the effects of your obtrusive physicality.”

“Center?” Nakia asked, the penetrating woman.

 _I can’t explain this. I’m running out of time,_ Strange realized hysterically. The madness of his entire purpose in this drama, to manipulate the power of a single simple sacrifice, struck him like a short-stop fall to ground. Ironically struggling to breathe in his non-body, he surveyed his small and desperate team: Wilson, manifesting with no effort at all, with his steady sense of anger and kindness; Nakia, sharp and quick, too strong of mind, noticing too much; Parker and his innocence and idealism battling it out to differentiate themselves in his personality, still on the edge of remembering his body; and the Alien-Tree, of all creatures, who was somehow the best adapted to deal with an anti-dimensional existence out of all them.

He looked up last at the soul-lights who knew nothing but a longing to return home.

Strange turned his sight back to the waiting bodies in front of him, one of which manifested before he did, one who did so quicker and better than he had anticipated and then helped another along the way, and the last who had manifested without his permission.

 _I’ll save them,_ Strange decided, wishing it wasn’t his decision.

“There’s a way out of here,” he said, growing in conviction. “It used to be everywhere, because there was no 'where' when you were all just floating around like candles. But now—“

Nakia and Wilson were immediately skeptical. Parker looked hopeful but was holding himself back, watching Nakia and Wilson exchange their skeptical looks.

“There’s a lock on the tesseract structure,” Strange explained. “A connection to the outside world. Something holding this singularity together, like a seam. If we are there when Captain Rogers and the others make their play, we can not only set ourselves loose, but the rest of the universe.”

No one said anything until Groot rose from his perch, placed his hands on his hips, and said, “Gamora told me that no evil is a match for trying our best. I say, let’s save Gamora."

 _A question of will,_ Strange observed sadly, recognizing that Groot was going to lose far more of himself if he thought Gamora’s life was up for grabs; but Groot had also magically stumbled onto the one helpful piece of advice among all the useless trite an adult says to comfort a kid. ‘Don’t give up,’ Gamora had probably said once. Don’t give up; We can save the universe yet.   
So Strange said nothing except, “Let’s go save Gamora.”

~

Nakia walked along the back of their company. Groot had taken the lead, confidently deciding that wherever he lead, he would find their destination. Dr. Strange-Wizard-man walked at his shoulder, seemingly more patient with the children now that they were agreeing with him. Parker bounced along closely behind them, whether from a sense of eagerness and excitement to be on a mission, or from a fairly recent mutation to his physical strength that his body was suddenly remembering in this weird soul-world. Possibly both.

Wilson, Sam, the Man with the Wings—he marched calmly several meters behind them, relaxed by all appearances to have Nakia at his back. She had read military-man on him almost immediately (she has had far too many encounters with American military men than she was happy with) but there was more to him than she had judged, after that ‘spherical cow’ comment, and now she was paranoid with figuring it out.

Hours into their mission of trying to find the “soul-stone seam,” where the case enclosing this particular Tesseract supposedly met with the outside world, the trail was still only a long glass-plane that offered little resistance to their traveling party. The kaleidoscope dome above them was subtly shifting the further they got from where they had started, but not in any significant ways. It was easy to step up beside Sam and match his careful pace.

“So,” she began, feeding that open friendliness into her voice that was always so vital when dealing with westerners. “How come you didn’t manifest with your wings? Could’ve flown us to this imaginary exit that definitely exists.”

Sam let out a staccato dry breath of air and let her see his amusement and disbelief.

“Nah,” he said. “I don’t have a strong enough will, didn’t you hear the wizard? Can’t think up a spot when I don’t even agree it’s real.”

They were pretty far behind now, but the general turbulence of the friendly argument going on between Strange, Peter, and Groot was drifting back, as if they were downwind. Nakia was starting to feel a specific texture beneath her steps, like the soft glass was trying to grind itself into soil and she could see that Groot’s steps were turning up the ground like a plow. The glowing-orange globes were dissipating.

“But nevertheless,” she pushed, spreading out her arms and flashing an over-the-top grin. “Wings.”

He chuckled, turning his face away from her. His skin was no longer reflecting the sparkles, just the sheen of their brightness. She could see him becoming more and more embodied with every step.

“How are you doing that?” She asked, pointing at his arm, so much more textured and solid than her own, which looked as if she had spilled a tub of glitter on a dark mirror. She could barely make out the color of her hair and skin, which was more upsetting than she enjoyed admitting. This wasn’t her real body, was it?

Sam shrugged, seemingly unconcerned, but when he spoke, he was more hesitant than nonchalant.

“I don’t know,” he said, running his hand down his arm. “I just, I remember something about my life and then everything around here—” he swept his gaze across the ‘trippy’ infinite landscape. “—becomes a little clearer to see. Ain’t doing it on purpose.”

“But I'm doing that as well,” she protested without heat, attentive to how she might sound like she’s whining, or prying, or both. “I keep remembering things about my body, but it's slow going, evidently.”

It really should not be so disheartening to be somewhat reflective and translucent.

“What specifically are you remembering?” she asked.He shrugged again but his revealing face had closed off.

“Just people, really,” he said. “Friends, family, I guess.”

Nakia did not want to remember her Friends and Family. She had to be clearheaded with so complex a mission.  


“Embodied,” she said. “We are embodying ourselves. Physicalizing.”

“Groot called it ‘growing a body,’” Sam said thoughtfully.“Huh,” Nakia said, fairly tickled.

“So what do you think this ‘seam,’ is?” Sam asked.“Probably a new way for ‘Wizard-dude’ to manipulate us,” she said. "If it even is what he says."

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Probably.”

He looked on the edge of his earlier rage.

“Oye,” she said, a new curiosity occurring to her.

“Why does Peter think you're a criminal?”

Sam groaned a little. “You know Tony Stark?” he asked, a thoroughly surprising start.

Nakia observed a stirring of amusement and frustration in her belly, and a flash of cheeky smile illuminating a scientific room slipped through the walls in her head.

_“Why didn’t you just reprogram the synapses to work collectively?”_

_“Because… we …didn’t think of it?_ ”

There were now decidedly crunching rocks and soil beneath their feet.

“Yes,” she replied through the pain, wiping away the memory’s influence. “Yes, the war-profiteer and metal-man, I know of him.”

Sam did not voice his concern but instead ran a hand over his mouth, holding back a mean-sounding sort of giggle. He was undoubtedly not a fan of Tony Stark.

“Yeah, that guy made some really bad decisions, blamed them on Captain America and everyone who agreed with Captain America, helped put me and a bunch of others in a creepy-ass jail, and used the kid to do it.”

She raised her eyebrows and he continued, his tone growing breezier.

“Me and Cap, and the others, we refused to sign the Sokovia Accords, helped a man escape a death-sentence without trial, and Tony fought us for it like the rich little bitch he always was.”

“I suspect there is a much longer story,” she said. “Did Peter know what he was helping Stark to do?”

“No,” Sam laughed bitterly. “Of course not, the kid's like twelve, or something. He didn’t know and since he’s under Tony Stark’s protection I guess, the Accords didn’t matter to him. And they definitely don’t matter now.”

Nakia swallowed down her questions. She had read the Accords (secretly acquired and put back where she found them) and tried to get T’Challa to shift Wakanda’s position. He was not open to suggestion at the time, still his Father’s son, through and through, with no reason to question his legitimacy.

 _Not even the counsel of his oldest friend or the most loyal Dora,_ she thought, without her own permission.

Nakia collapsed forward on the ground, catching herself on her arms, her hands shivering in the cold, wet, and starry dirt.

“Nakia!” Sam exclaimed from above her. He knelt down beside her and she felt a tentative hand brush her shoulder and leaned into its warmth.

“What is it?” he asked softly.

She breathed deeply, watching her skin slip into a shimmery solid brown.

 _Okoye,_ she thought.

~

Okoye would hike into the mountains sometimes, just to see how far she could go. She would start at the bottom, below the foothills, at the bank of the river. One time Nakia had insisted on joining her.The river-bank had been icy—the cold run-off from the mountain’s winter slipping down into the spring valley below. But Okoye just never yielded to weather.

“Is your walking stick made of vibranium?” Nakia asked, her mouth tugging into a reluctant smile. Nakia was always on the edge of poking fun at Okoye and Okoye's traditionalisms, though she clearly never wanted to go any further.Okoye rapped her stick on the ravine wall to her left. It made a light wooden sound.

“No,” she replied without elaboration.

They reached another dead end on the narrow ledge, so Okoye swung her stick across her pack, bent down to grab a handful of dry dirt, and rubbed the dust into her knuckles, ridding her grip of clammy and slippery sweat. She assessed the wall in front of her, picked her path up, and then started climbing. She had to start over twice, but she managed to find a new ledge after only ten or so vertical meters. Once she reached the top, she turned and held out her arm. Nakia bounced back and forth on her right and left foot for one brief moment then she squatted, raised her arms, and jumped. Her left hand grasped Okoye’s, their thumbs hooking round each other firmly, and she used her momentum to push off the wall lightly with the balls of her feet as Okoye guided her to safety.

Sometimes Nakia’s strength took Nakia herself by surprise and she needed help figuring out where to point it. But only sometimes.When Okoye was young, she had vowed to herself to always be there for those rare sometimes.

Once the trail forward no longer required so much sheer-rock scaling, Okoye started to sing. It was an old traveling song, the words older than Wakanda itself, and the melody older than that.  As it is with music.

Nakia laughed and called up to her, “I’m almost afraid to ask if you know any music written this century!”

Okoye shot her a dirty look over her shoulder but once she had turned back around, Nakia’s voice had joined hers.They marched on.There was a little enclave settlement nestled sweetly in the foothills—a few kilometers below the grasslands spread out in an abundant celebration. Okoye used to run down the steep and winding paths to the great pastures beneath, what felt like to her, an isolated home, and there she would meet with the children whose parents rode to imaginary battle with impenetrable robes and flighty stallions. On the road between her small town and herds-people humming between the mountains and city, Okoye met Nakia.And there they were again, as they were before it all: Okoye singing and Nakia laughing.

Okoye chose to skirt around her old village, picking the narrow and dangerous trails between the hills leading to the mountainside. Nakia made a noise as if to protest as they ducked beyond the site of the airy temple to the east. But Okoye had stopped singing and Nakia continued to follow where she lead.They camped in a cozy vale, on a platform Okoye and her younger brother and older sister had built many years before. In the morning they began their trek again. They were wordless except for Okoye’s singing.By mid-day they were no longer weaving through the ups-and-downs of the foothills, but found themselves breathing harder as their trail faced straight up. Okoye unwrapped her walking stick from her pack, pulled out her water-bladder and slung it around her shoulder, retied her shoes, and attached her small vibranium knife to her waist. She hid the rest of her pack a few meters off her well-trod trail watched Nakia do the same.

They climbed until the sun signaled its last hour in the sky.

“So this is it,” Nakia said, breathing deeply as she surveyed her surroundings with a careful eye. She still had her cloak tied around her waist despite the biting chill; her bare shoulders and face glowed. “This is where the unflappable Okoye goes when…”

She didn’t finish, just kept her eyes on the horizon so many thousands of steps away from where she stood, eyes squinting against the sun.

Okoye collapsed on the ledge. It wasn’t really her place to go (when…). It was a spot she had found herself many times before, just like several other highly remote outlooks between her town and the Jabari dwellings beyond. This was one arbitrary endpoint among many.

“Sometimes,” she replied between breaths to Nakia. “Sometimes I come here.”

Nakia unhooked her water-bladder, dropped it on the ground, and gently sat herself next to Okoye’s overheated yet shivering body. Okoye was still heaving in air, recovering from the burn it took to arrive there. She lay down on her cloak, threw her arms over her head, let her feet dangle over the cliffside and closed her eyes. Nakia copied her.

After a few moments Nakia said, “I don’t want to be queen.”

Okoye hummed, letting the dark orange of the setting sun warm her cheeks and naked knees.

Nakia continued, “I suppose I wouldn’t mind it, though, if I actually wanted to be with T’Challa.”

Okoye’s eyes snapped open and she twisted her head to make sure Nakia noticed her shock.

Nakia’s eyes were shut tight, tears slowly making their way past the corners of her eyebrows to her beautiful ears.

“Nakia,” Okoye whispered.

“I just,” Nakia said. “I love him, but I don’t love him enough.”

“That’s not true, Nakia,” Okoye said brokenly. “Love isn’t—love isn’t—”

She clenched her fists in the cold dirt beneath her and struggled to speak against the weighty conventions and misgivings she had long trained herself to carry.

“Love isn’t a quantity, Nakia,” Okoye said in one breath. Her chest heaved in the thin air as she worked her way through her thought. “It either is or isn’t. The possible...insufficiencies of human relationships lie elsewhere.”

Nakia snorted softly and asked, “And what do you suppose our insufficiencies are, between T’Challa and me?”

Okoye felt her face pinch as she slowly replied, “I don’t know. I am not you and I am not T’Challa.”

Nakia accepted her answer and they were silent again.

“You’re both so similar,” Nakia began hesitantly, as if she had not meant to speak aloud. “So similar and yet I understand you far more than I understand him. Maybe that’s what it is.”

“Maybe,” Okoye said. “Maybe.”

“Ironic, maybe, too, that you are ready to make a vow to him when I am not.”

The sun had fifteen minutes left and when Okoye gazed at the still towering mountain behind her and the endless world stretching beyond her dangling feet, she saw a world bathed in benevolent and brightly colored fire.

“It is not a vow to him,” Okoye said, sitting up and letting the breeze dry her skin. “It’s not a vow to the throne. It is all symbolic, you know. A vow is not the loyalty itself.”

“So what is ‘the loyalty’?” Nakia asked, sitting up and pressing her warm shoulder to Okoye’s chilled one.

“I cannot name it,” Okoye said, serenely letting the words drift off the cliff and free-fall.Nakia pressed closer.

“I wish you would come with me,” Nakia said, grinning. “Like my own personal compass. I will never be lost in the great wide world with a decorated Dora by my side.”

Okoye opened her hand up in her lap and Nakia without hesitation placed her palm inside the grasp of Okoye’s fingers.

“I miss her,” Okoye finally admitted, her voice cracking. “I miss her so much.”

“I miss her, too,” Nakia said, her warm smile sharing space with her grief.

“I cannot lose you both,” Okoye gasped out, barely believing she managed to voice something so terrifying.

“You won’t,” Nakia said, squeezing Okoye’s hand, forgetting her own supernatural strength, nearly crushing. “I’m not going away forever. I’m coming back. The work I’m doing is for Wakanda—for you.”

The sun had dipped below the edge of the earth and fiery-pink had abruptly flipped to silvery twilight. The lingering brightness in the atmosphere was nearly icy. To the east, the comforting darkest of blues was leaking into the sky.

Okoye started to sing again and Nakia delicately placed her head on Okoye’s shoulder. Okoye imagined that her clear voice might ring, not just in the thin air, but in her body, and reverberate with clarity from the vibrating skin of her neck right through to Nakia’s bones: as if they, with two opposite minds, could invent intimacy.


	4. Chapter 4

**PART II: THE BRIDGE**

The world was dark. Sam blinked several times, but the fairy lights and kaleidoscope sky didn’t reappear.  
  
“What did you do?!” Dr. Strange was shouting. Sam could still hear Nakia gasping through a memory, but Peter and Groot were silent.  
  
Gravity began to warp in the inky blackness—the pull to the ground intensified but, for Sam, the ground was emptying of substance. Strange was still shouting but now he sounded more like an echo from beyond the corner of deep canyon. Just as Sam was reaching out to Nakia, her shout of surprise rang out, thin, as if she had slipped distantly away.  
  
“Nakia!” Sam said sharply. “Groot!”  
  
His voice crackled in front of him, a long golden string that withered away, yielding to the darkness. The ground dropped away and Sam fell with it.  
  
~  
  
Strange opened his eyes to the great cycles of time. He had failed.  
  
Back in his own body, the otherworldly green hue came from the crystal around him rather than his own skin. He was sheltered in the time stone. He was locked inside its eternal spin—the simultaneity of the fourth dimension, solidified in one impenetrable gemstone, caged his mortal body.  
  
In one sense, that Strange could not suppress even now, it was a relief to be ultimately committed to this new beautiful prism. No mortal mind before had witnessed the internal shape of a Stone. Previous Guardians had, of course, known that should one venture into its depths, the nature of the fourth dimension would either shatter one’s mind or trap it for as long as the stone was allowed its orbit. It was a caveat, a scary story, that Strange headed until he no longer had any choice. The Time Stone protected him from Thanos’s condemnation and his training provided him the ability to walk amongst the soul stone to guide the best path of fate to fruition— a simple projection of a past self who would have also vanished into the Soul Stone’s clutches. Such were the benefits of manipulating time.  
  
Strange now realized that was all he had the power to manipulate. Or to guide. He had miscalculated. Now it was up to Marvel and her team to build the bridge and shatter Thanos’s power.  
  
He had failed, yes, but sentenced to an eternal afterlife in a place like this…  
  
Tears fell from his cheeks and he didn’t lift a hand to catch them. He sat on the steep emerald edge of a waterfall that fell in every direction. He could taste the stream as it fell around him and through him and the light of millions of interconnecting crystal wheels lit up the upper dome of the stone. The fire of an infinitude of lights, lit and extinguished, sat on his tongue. Flowers bloomed and withered and fell away and bloomed again on the banks of the river. The wind was both storm and still. And yet, for all its simultaneity, Stephen Strange could hear a music pulsing forward, ever on and on. Strange sat in awe, face to face with eternity.  
  
~  
  
Sam was falling and he knew he shouldn’t be comfortable with it but he was. He had been falling for so long, pretending the steps he took weren’t just steps on hollow air. If this was the end, just a prolonged fall in a directionless space, where nothing and everything was relative in the void, then so be it. He would fall.  
  
He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed but either way he felt himself slipping into a lucid dream. His family were with him, small and perched on his shoulders and arms, laughing at a corny holiday movie, cheering at a softball tournament, waving signs at an airport…  
  
Steve was with him, exactly where he shouldn’t be. Only this Steve was young, wearing paint-splattered coveralls, walking on thin air beside him, hands stuffed his pockets, grinning wryly at a tumbling Sam.  
  
“Hey, Sam,” Steve said, running a knobby hand through his hair, absolutely drowning in his clothes. “How are your classes going?”  
  
“Good,” Sam replied. “My physics professor is a hard-ass but the lab is really interesting, so it all balances out.”  
  
“That’s great,” Steve said, still shuffling along in the careful way a bigger more muscled Steve never did. “If you want any more help with your civil-engineering project, let me know. I had a lot of fun working with you on that bridge.”  
  
“Me too,” Sam said, brightening. “We make a good team.”  
  
“Yeah,” Steve said, blushing, nearly causing Sam to blush as well. “I’ll see you 'round.”  
  
Sam ached at that promise, latching onto the weight of it, wrapping his arms desperately around the smell of acrylics and coffee left behind in Steve’s wake.  
  
The darkness snapped and he opened his eyes. He was falling but now he could see that below him there was hazy marsh. The air around him was heavy and moist, a nearly blinding cloudy night-sky after the void from before. With no time to prepare himself, he was careening into the shallow murky water barely outlined by the dimmest of starlight. He felt as if he would fall through the sandy bottom of the marsh floor, but a collection of vines and pond scum tangled around his limbs and flung him onto a muddy bank.  
  
Sam leaned over and coughed up the swamp water and muck. He rested briefly on the wet shore before lifting his head to survey his surroundings. It looked like a polluted watershed in Louisiana. Or at least it sounded like one. While the air normally pulsed with life, chirps and growls and buzzing and all sorts, this swamp was silent and still. The absence of mosquito attacks was unnerving.  
  
He stumbled to his feet and realized he was still draped in the starry garments from the crystal world he had first fallen into. His skin had lost all the healthy brown he had slowly gained, back to its original reflective, glass-like prism. He stood glowing, the brightest thing in the whole marsh.  
  
Sam twisted every which way but could see no obvious trail to take. He was alone.  
  
For the first time since his bizarre journey began, Sam found himself missing Strange. At least Stange had a plan. Sam had nothing. By all rational accounts, he was simply dead.  
  
“Maybe this is purgatory,” Sam muttered, digging his bare starry toes into the wet earth. “Maybe I just have to wait.”  
  
Without his permission, his body flopped back down to the ground, splashing mud up his sides and the underside of his chin.  
  
No mission, no comrades, no objective, no path forward. Just a bog and the near-certainty of Steve’s imminent death.  
  
When Steve had first asked to kiss Sam, (quick, blushing, but bold), Sam had known something new in his life, something fecund like a garden, something green. Perhaps that singularity of new potential existed somewhere in the universe like an infinity stone in its own right. There they stood, bursting with all the potential energy of a cart poised at the top of roller coaster, kissing under the boughs of a redwood tree.  
  
_“I bet the view from up top is breathtaking,” Sam whispered against Steve’s jaw. He felt Steve’s amused smiled on his cheekbone._  
  
Time didn’t pause in that moment but something did. The mission to find the Winter Soldier and save his soul, the mission to be the soldiers of an endless fight, the downward pull to the worst moments in either of their lives… One kiss couldn’t wipe these things from their minds or existence, and yet Sam had found a stillness in Steve’s tenderness that he would spend the rest of his life leaning into.  
  
The words rose easily to his lips and the melody shifted free in his throat. Sam’s grandfather’s favorite tune, sung sometimes over a slow and rhythmic picking banjo, but mostly over his herb garden on the back porch.  
  
As Sam sung in the dead-bog, the lights on his skin began to spin rapidly. His arms grew warm with the friction of their movement. He sang on, watching with increasing bewilderment as the spinning lights sprouted feathers, soft fluffy news ones, all along his forearms.  
  
His voice caught in his throat and the feathers stopped sprouting. But instead of retreating they lay down on his arm and soon Sam had a golden feathery pattern littered across his skin.  
  
“What the hell,” he said.  
  
“I am Groot?” a small voice replied.  
  
Sam nearly wept in relief.  
  
~  
  
Nakia was on fire. One moment she was collapsed on a crystal ground and the next she was spinning wildly in a company of bright colorful flames, erupting without sound. She screamed at first, feeling as if she was burning up herself, but after a few panicked moments she realized her screams were silent and her body was cold.  
  
Nakia wrapped her arms around herself, pulling in to dispel the dizziness and wishing the spinning would stop, that the fires would cease. But the closer she pulled herself in, the faster she spun. Everything was wildfire, eating up nothing.  
  
~  
  
T’Challa had once told her about how the Black Panther powers felt like a lightning bolt evaporating his nerves. He had said that, while the flower took hold of your body, you wanted nothing more in the world than for the pain to stop. His father had trained him to meditate from a young age so that when that urge struck he would have the presence of mind to believe it was worth it, to have faith in the strength of his own blood.  
  
It was that calm faith perhaps that had so neatly severed their romantic relationship. T’Challa had never really struggled with his duty, having a profound conscientiousness from the beginning that was nurtured so well by his open and intelligent upbringing. His questions were always in the how not the why. His work _would_ be worth doing.  
  
Nakia on the other hand had to find her battles, strategize the routes she would take up which mountains. She couldn’t be Queen. She couldn’t be a partner. The generosity of her work drew its power from her independence of person. What she owed to the world was herself, not a specific work or skill.  
  
When she had rejected the invitation to train as a Dora, T’Challa had been confused and hurt but trying his hardest not to show it. Okoye had been unsurprised. Their respective reactions were not what she was expecting from either of them. T’Challa was thoughtful and serene and growing more so the deeper his apprenticeship into Kinghood went. Okoye was severe and judging, perhaps because her mind was so penetrating. Nakia had assumed that T’Challa would shrug her decision off, adapt to her new calling with ease. Okoye, Nakia thought, would put up a fight, because when Okoye thinks something is for the best, Okoye is normally right.  
  
T’Challa had snapped at her after a few days of the silent treatment and Okoye had found her stuffing herself with fried food in her favorite restaurant near the academy campus. Okoye never said anything of it and T’Challa never mentioned it until she was leaving the country years later, officially ending their relationship and his quiet hopes to convince her  to fit into the role of Queen.  
  
Nakia had wondered as the years passed, while Okoye slowly worked her way to become the youngest Dora Milaje General in the history of Wakanda and T’Challa had slipped under the current of a demanding future as King, if somehow she had misread everything.  
  
~  
  
Nakia’s mind came back online and instead of pulling in on herself she started to push her arms and legs out, uncurling her body and opening her chest. The simplest of physics lesson, in a crisis moment, forgotten but remembered. She felt the effects almost immediately. As if she was suspended by a string, the spinning came to halt before reversing back on itself, wringing out the energy one revolution at a time. Eventually Nakia was suspended, weightless but still, while flames danced around her body, gentle and cool to the touch.  
  
Out of the flames a figure began to emerge. It moved deliberately and with feline grace. Only until it’s fiery face was inches from Nakia’s nose did Nakia recognize her.  
  
_Bast._  
  
~


	5. Chapter 5

  
“Bast!” Nakia gasped mutely.  
  
“Young Nakia, she who is gifted with my strength,” Bast greeted, her voice flame itself, wrapping around Nakia’s forehead before flickering back to the fiery fur that outlined Bast’s body. Nakia always thought that when she came face-to-face with the cause of her unnatural abilities, she would have a few choice words with her, but, as it was, Nakia was speechless.  
  
Nakia simply stared up at Bast, at the deep purple eyes that glowed but were also somehow dark and depthless; at the coarse-looking black fur made up of erupting fire, pushed and pulled by a non-existent wind; at the claws and tail and ears and shoulder blades. Bast circled Nakia, blowing her gently to and fro, until Nakia found herself settling on a grassy floor, the flames shimmering into the blues of the grassland sky.  
  
Bast lay down in front of her and rested her head on her paws. Nakia, standing, came up to Bast’s nose.  
  
“Bast,” Nakia tried again. Her voiced was a whisper but she could hear it now.  
  
“What are you doing here, Nakia?” Bast asked.  
  
“I must be dead,” Nakia said. “But I don’t really know.”  
  
“Your universe has been stricken,” Bast said. “Robbed of half of itself.”  
  
“Yes, it’s all highly regrettable,” Nakia replied blankly.  
  
“Yet here you are,” Bast concluded.  
  
“Not in the universe anymore.”  
  
“Are you not?”  
  
“I’ve received some intelligence that I’ve been sucked into an Infinity Stone with half of all living things,” Nakia said delicately. “I think I am dead.”  
  
Bast’s fiery face gave the impression of raising a skeptical eyebrow. Nakia resisted the urge to fidget.  
  
“You are eager to accept that outcome,” Bast observed. “But you are not dead.”  
  
“I don’t have a death-wish,” Nakia said, feeling a need to defend herself.  
  
“You are not dead, Nakia,” Bast repeated. “What do you make of your situation now?”  
  
“I am mostly surprised I am not on fire,” Nakia said, gesturing around at the flames encircling them.  
  
“You are not dead, Nakia—”  
  
“I might as well be!” Nakia snapped, her heart thudding hard against her ribs. Her uselessness tasted sour. “I’m here and not _there_. Where I should be. Where I can _help_.”  
  
Bast blinked at her, sending a wave of purple heat down on Nakia’s face. It felt like Nakia’s father blowing cool air on her scraped knees.  
  
“So this is _your_ fight, then?” Bast asked.  
  
Nakia rubbed her temples.  
  
“I don’t know what you mean,” Nakia said. “This fight belongs to everyone.”  
  
“By my reckoning,” Bast said calmly. “This fight belongs to half of everyone.”  
  
Nakia felt like she was being teased.  
  
“Because I’m _dead_ ,” Nakia said, frustrated. “Half of everyone is _dead_. Like I already said.”  
  
Bast laughed at her, rolling onto her side like a lazy house-cat.  
  
“I do like you, Nakia,” she said. “You have spirit.”  
  
“People only ever tell me that to avoid insulting me,” Nakia huffed, dropping to the grass as if it wasn’t made of yellow flame and there wasn’t a enormous goddess giggling at her sincerity.  
  
“You have such spirt, Nakia.’ They say when what they really mean is, ‘Be quiet, Nakia. Do as you’re told, Nakia. Don’t abandon your country, Nakia.’”  
  
“I hope you do not expect any pity,” Bast said. “Wild things are incapable of expressing it.”  
  
“Is that your subtle way of accusing me of _self_ -pity, then?” Nakia asked petulantly and coldly, plucking a flame-grass blade and folding it.  
  
“You feel sorrow for yourself, which is good,” Bast said. “But do you feel you or your situation are pitiful?”  
  
Nakia considered for a moment, plucking another blade to weave into the first.  
  
“You’re asking if I _regret_ my situation?” she clarified.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Nakia continued to weave the flame-blades together.  
  
“It’s not possible to live without regret,” Nakia said, conceding something she had long protected.  
  
“Yes it is,” Bast said. “As I said, wild things are incapable of expressing it.”  
  
“I do not believe you,” Nakia said, sending Bast a challenging stare. “Pain and regret—I do not think these are experiences that are above the wilderness.”

“Above?” Bast said pointedly. “Why you chose that direction, of all relative directions, I wonder.”  
  
“That’s not the point,” Nakia said, hearing old annoying philosophies ringing like pure-tones in her ears. “It is a condition of mortal life to feel pain and regret and the pain of regret. Because our lives end, every moment, I suppose, carries with it the all the moments that did not happen—”  
  
Nakia struggled for a word and dropped her weaving. Bast waited a beat before supplying a suggestion.  
  
“Because of your choices.”  
  
“Yes,” Nakia sighed, picking up her weaving again.  
  
“So,” Bast continued. “As you see it, choice necessitates regret.”  
  
Nakia nodded, focused on the grass.  
  
They sat in silence, Bast appearing to soak up the sun and Nakia trying not to contemplate what was so disturbing about the whole of their conversation.  
  
“You were born of the people beside the river, you Humans,” Bast said.  
  
Nakia looked up from her small project. The flames around the base of their small circle were shifting into the greens and rich browns of flowing water and eroding sediment.  
  
“You have much of the river with you,” Bast said. “As all life on Earth, you walk by its current like a friend. You and your family and everyone beyond.”  
  
Nakia met Bast’s eyes.  
  
“I will tell you this, young Nakia,” Bast said, her voice deep and kind. “You cannot regret what you commit to. A lioness does not regret a failed hunt because it failed or because she made a mistake. No, she has her commitment. It is a commitment to live. Whatever pain ahead of her before her death does not correct or infect that commitment.”  
  
Nakia watched the flames in front of her react to Bast’s words. Images of lions running across the clear plains, horses racing through shallow rivers, trees sprouting on top of hills growing into mountains—her home sparkled to life shaped by every color that fire could take. Uninvited, the poison of Thanos’s army invaded her memory and the fire burned with her love and throb of so much loss. In her mind’s eye, she saw Okoye standing with her spear, covered in alien blood and setting the battlefield ablaze.  
  
“I should be out there,” Nakia said, brokenly, tears slipping from her wide eyes. “I should be fighting beside them. Beside _her_.”  
  
“But you are not,” Bast reminded her, unnecessarily. “You are in here.”  
  
“So I’ll fight _in here_ ,” Nakia said, fiercely, bringing herself to her feet. “Tell me how.”  
  
Bast rolled to her feet as well. She crouched down and pressed her nose to Nakia’s forehead. A shower of purple breath sprinkled over Nakia and she felt her body tingle, as if Okoye was behind her, meticulously and affectionately weaving flowers into Nakia’s hair, as she used to so long ago.  
  
“Find the seam,” Bast said. The flames started to engulf her once more. “Find the seam and pierce it.”  
  
As Bast disappeared into the fire, it brightened. Nakia had to shield her eyes with her arm against the heat and luminosity. When she lowered her arm she stood in a mountainous range made of glowing embers. In her hand was a vibranium spear.  
  
Nakia knew if she started laughing, it would turn into hysterics and she might never recover.  
  
“Oh, Okoye,” Nakia said softly. It was Okoye’s spear. She would recognize it anywhere. She helped her make it. Nakia, Okoye, and Okoye’s sister and brother—they all put their stamp on Okoye’s weapon. That day in the workshop, just a few months before Okoye’s sister’s death, it was one of the few moments in Nakia’s life that offered her no counterargument to her joy.  
  
Nakia would stand hand in hand with T’Challa in the most beautiful parts of the city, laughing and teasing and kissing, and still she longed to _move_. For so long she and her parents and grandparents had been the happy vagabonds of Wakanda, the people who actually wanted to spend most of their lives outside its border. But every time one of their journeys ended and Nakia came home, every-time she leaped onto her horse to race up the hills to Okoye’s small home, every time she spotted Okoye’s queenly grin running up to meet her, Nakia felt single-minded.  
  
Here she was, not dead, with Okoye’s staff, spear, walking-stick, and family-heirloom.  
  
“I will not be trapped here,” Nakia whispered to herself, wrapping her woven grass-flame bracelet around the shaft of the spear and collapsing the spear to fit into her pocket.  
  
She looked up and along the starry horizon she could make out the silhouette of a mountain range. Above the highest peak, the sky was stitched together with a bronze glowing thread.  
  
Nakia took a deep breath and began to run, her feet immune to the heat of the embers, her strides long, her lungs steady.  
  
It had been a long time since Nakia was simply allowed to let go and run.  
  
~  
  
Groot looked up at Sam with a teary face and quivering mouth. He was smaller than the last time Sam had seen him, only about half-a-foot tall. He held his hands clasped together, clutching something to his chest.  
  
“I am Groot?” he repeated.  
  
Sam knelt down in front of the tree and held out his own hands. Groot scrambled out of the mud and Sam lifted him up to his face.  
  
“Hey, Groot, buddy,” Sam said. “How’s it going?”  
  
Groot offered his cupped hands up to Sam and when Sam looked down he saw a small blue spider cradled between Groot’s palms.  
  
“I am Groot,” Groot explained.  
  
Sam frowned at the spider.  
  
“Peter?” he asked.  
  
“Hey, Mr Falcon, sir,” a tiny watery voice replied.  
  
“What happened?” Sam asked, horrified.  
  
“I am Groot,” Groot said, his voice watery and scared as well.  
  
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Peter replied hysterically, shifted nervously on Groots minuscule hands. “One minute everything was fine and then Dr. Strange shouted something and it reminded me of my Aunt May and suddenly I couldn’t think anymore and everything was getting really small and then Groot was picking me up and saying I’m a spider and then we heard you singing and now we’re here.”  
  
Sam made a soothing sound as Peter told his story, sending a fond and concerned glance Groot’s way.  
  
“Ok, ok, Peter,” Sam said. “It’ll be fine. You two found me. Now we’re all together.”  
  
Peter made a squeaking sound but didn’t protest.  
  
“I am Groot,” Groot said, still timid and teary.  
  
“Thanks, Groot,” Sam said. “It was an old song my grandpa sang to me when I was little and scared, too.”  
  
Groot’s lower lip shook only slightly but he took a small breath and grew a little more calm.  
  
“I am Groot,” he said, determined.  
  
Sam nodded at him and took in the world before him once more. Nothing but marsh and swamp and mud. The only light source was him.  
  
“Any direction is better than none,” Sam decided.  
  
He lifted Groot up to his shoulder and let Groot and Peter settle beside his neck.  
  
“Let’s go,” he said.  
  
~  
  
  
“If you could,” Okoye asked, “Would you give it back?”  
  
Steve avoided her gaze, running his thumb along the edge of his shield. Normally before battle he didn’t have time to chat or to worry—normally his team turned their faces to his, seeking that bright spot that always seemed to hang over Steve’s right shoulder: that inexplicable strength that only existed because everyone agreed it did. But Captain Rogers was not leading this mission.  
  
He and Okoye stood at the helm of the ship, careful eyes on Captain Marvel’s small vessel encroaching on the atmosphere of Thanos’s planet, where alien armies waited on his imperial direction. While Marvel engaged with Thanos’s wizards, and everyone else met brute force with brute force, Steve and Okoye stood prepared to distract Thanos in a sort of intimate duel that Steve was all too familiar with.  
  
She placed a hand on his upper arm while he tried to figure a way out of being honest. Unfortunately, because of what was being asked of them, the utter togetherness of the approaching challenge before the two of them, Steve would have an easier time lying to his fist than to the person beside him.  
  
“Give it all back?” he repeated back to her. “I already tried to.”  
  
She removed her arm but turned to face him. He attention was pointed.  
  
“What do you mean?” she asked.  
  
Steve swallowed down a mouthful of icy saline water.  
  
“I was raised Catholic, you know,” he started, well-aware that if Natasha or Tony were within earshot, the teasing would be relentless. “I thought about the serum and it’s effect on me in pretty strict religious terms. I was blessed with both a new body and new purpose. I always assumed that my body would be an offering of sort once I succeeded in the mission. I would return divine gifts back to the divine. I would not use divine gifts for anything other than service. I thought dying in the Arctic was the best end for—everything.”  
  
Okoye didn’t respond at first. She hardly reacted at all.  
  
“So you would.” She said finally.  
  
He looked down at her and found a surprising sympathy hovering on the edges of her forthright demeanor.  
  
“I want a future without fighting,” Steve said quietly, poking at the ache of Sam’s absence for the first time in a long time. “I never wanted to fight and kill. I want a future with someone. Someone to come home with.”  
  
“So you would,” she said again.  
  
“No,” he said, twisting his gaze back to Marvel’s vessel. “I wouldn’t give it all back. That’s not the point.”  
  
Okoye snorted.  
  
“The point,” she muttered to herself, turning her body to face forward again. “Nakia also thinks regret is—unproductive. She has always known how to let go. I guess I always let her.”  
  
“You disagree?”  
  
Okoye shook her head and said nothing. The planet of doom grew larger in the viewing screen.  
  
“What do you choose to let go?” Okoye asked softly. “You would not change the past, you would not re-change yourself. You choose only to choose differently in the future. So.. What do you think we are supposed to carry, if not regret or--the burden of our past?”  
  
Steve suddenly felt as if Okoye was addressing someone much younger. He felt shrunk and bent over; felt the dull beating of chronic pain and the knobby large hands affixed to thin wrists.  
  
_“Thank you,” Sam said so quietly Steve wouldn’t have heard it without the serum._  
  
_Steve nodded, keeping his focus on rubbing the lotion in Sam’s hand but knowing Sam was sending him a sheepish smile to take place of the unwarranted apology he wanted to give but knew Steve would not accept._  
  
_“Thank_ you _,” Steve replied in the same tone, meaning it. “The air is too dry here. This helps my hands too.”_  
  
_Sam wrapped both hands around Steve’s and squeezed hard enough for Steve to notice the unyielding pressure. Steve glanced up, catching Sam’s eyes, feeling held._  
  
_“I love you,” Sam said._  
  
_Steve dropped his head onto their clasped hands._  
  
Steve slung his shield onto his back.  
  
“I don’t know, Okoye,” he said. “I always thought our duty was to carry each others’ pain. But maybe I’m wrong.”  
  
Okoye flickered a slightly unhinged look up at him.  
  
“You’re a very noble man, Steven Rogers,” she said, ironically.  
  
“Not nearly,” he said, smiling down at her. “I’m scrappy and mean. And today,” he continued, “I follow you, General Okoye.”  
   
She grinned sharply.  
  
~  
  
“I’m sorry for putting you in jail, Mr. Falcon,” Peter said abruptly into the quiet. They had been trudging along for what could have been hours or minutes, it was impossible to say. Sam was covered head to toe in mud and rotten swamp gunk. He felt itchy and irritated and sad and alone. Groot’s warm body on his neck had slipped down to the cradle of his elbow, asleep and unaware. Peter sat on top of Groot's head.  
  
“You didn’t know what you were doing,” Sam grumbled out, tugging on a vine to free his left foot from yet another slippery pool.  
  
“Still,” Peter said. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“It was a mess for everyone, Peter,” Sam sighed. “You’re a kid. You aren’t allowed to blame yourself.”  
  
“You blame Mr. Stark,” Peter said quietly.  
  
“He is to blame,” Sam muttered.  
  
Peter didn’t argue.  
  
They trudged along a few more minutes (or hours or days) when Groot suddenly snapped awake.  
  
“I am Groot!” he shouted, shaking and panicking.  
  
“Gamora?” Peter and Sam both asked, baffled.  
  
“I am Groot!” Groot shouted again pointing.  
  
In the space after his desperate shout, Sam heard it. A distant but distinct scream of _No!_  
  
“I hear her!” Peter gasped, darting up Sam’s chest and onto his right shoulder.

Sam heard the scream again.  
  
He started running.  
  
Groot was shouting in his ear, Peter’s voice was lost in the wind, and Sam was finally focused on a goal, a concrete goal. His feet were slapping the mud hard and fast enough not to sink, he was dodging bush a bramble and vine, he could feel his body prickling with the effort, his lungs burning.  
  
So focused, he didn’t realize the terrain was shifting or that he was starting to glow brighter. The vegetation was thinning out and the ground was growing steeper. The smell of the bog had long disappeared and the wet air had dried up.  
  
He was running up a mountain before he even realized it.  
  
It wasn’t an ordinary mountain. The stone was soft and felt like tree bark. It was growing upward under Sam’s striding feet, lifting him up hundreds of feet of elevation with every step he took.  
  
_“No!”_ the woman’s voice rang out again and Sam’s head pinched with Groot’s responding pained cry.  
  
“ _No!”_ the woman screamed again. Sam put on more speed, his thighs weighing him down like stones.  
  
“No!”  
  
The scream was getting closer. Sam crested another peak and Groot gripped his ear, shouting, “I am Groot!” up against the wind.  
  
_We’re coming, Gamora!_  
  
Sam burst over a shark’s fin edge and nearly tumbled over the other side of a cliff. He paused in his pursuit, breathing hard and shivering. He felt his arms tingle as his core tensed--his body was preparing to take flight, remembering that's what he did in a time of crisis. He forced down the desire to leap.   
  
Beyond them lay a rickety path, a narrow ledge leading up to the a dome and a great spiked cliff overhanging a smooth mosaic ground. On the ledge, Sam could make out a human-figure struggling against an unseen force, screaming. Before he could react, he watched as she was thrown over the cliff, dropping in a horrific suspended fall and fragmenting on the tiles below.  
  
“Oh my god,” Sam whispered roughly.  
  
Then, just as suddenly as she has died, she was back up on the cliff, struggling with the same unseen force, playing out the same struggle before the fall.  
  
“What—”  
  
“I am Groot,” Groot cried, leaping down from Sam’s shoulder and racing off to the narrow pathway up to the dome.  
  
“Groot, wait,” Sam yelled, jumping after him. But Groot was growing larger with each step he took and Sam couldn’t keep up with him. As they raced up the narrow path, Sam watched as the woman was flung again and again over the cliff edge, screaming, “No!” every time.  
  
The ledge was shifting underneath him as he ran, groaning as it became wider and grew steps on its face. Sam could see small offshoots of leafy twigs popping into being as Groot ran up to Gamora.

When Sam reached the dome, his horror intensified. A woman with green skin was gasping against an invisible hand on her neck, her legs kicked out and her eyes were wide with terror. Sam watched as Groot desperately tried to grab Gamora’s arm, her leg, to keep her from being tossed off the edge of the cliff. But no matter what he did, she still went over.  
  
“This is horrible,” Peter whispered beside him, shocked and subdued.  
  
Groot was digging into the earth, wrapping Gamora’s body with long sturdy roots and branches, screaming as she screamed—Gamora was tossed over the edge again.  
  
Sam couldn’t take it anymore. He ran forward and gripped Groot’s shoulder before he make another grab for Gamora.  
  
“Groot,” Sam shouted, shaking Groot, pulling his chin to face Sam. “Look at me! Please, Groot, look at me! It’s not her, it’s just a--a-- a mirage, or something!”  
  
Groot was sobbing and quaking, reaching out for Gamora, so Sam tugged him behind the dome, putting all his weight into dragging him away from the edge.  
  
“Groot, listen to me,” Sam said, gripping Groot’s face between his hands. “Please, listen, I know it’s hard but we need to _think_ about this.”  
  
Groot was struggling to breathe through his sobs. Gamora’s terrified scream rang out again and he flinched towards the cliff edge.  
  
Sam pulled Groot’s face back round.  
  
“No,” Sam insisted. “Listen to me.” Sam pushed his palms up against Groot’s ears and pulled Groot’s face onto his shoulder. With his mouth pressed to the side of Groot’s head, Sam started humming. He ignored the golden glow on his arms and back.   
  
He had no plan beyond blocking out Gamora’s record-player death. But slowly Groot’s sobs petered out and Sam was able to think again. Looking beyond the cliff edge from where Gamora was being thrown Sam could make out a strange constellation in the sky, a stitching pattern, glowing yellow amidst all the stars glowing white.  
  
“Groot,” Sam said in awe. “I think I found the seam.”  
  
~  
  
Nakia was on fire again, but she suspected now that she was made of flame rather being engulfed by it. She had never run this hard and this long before, always too scared of how limitless her own limits seemed. But now she was wired and burning a path up the mountains. And like everything else in this strange singularity of a world, the earth bent to her mind and pushed against her feet so she could climb quicker.  
  
Just as she reached the summit, where she stood with bare feet in deep snow, Nakia realized she was still racing towards the horizon. The seam sketched out in the sky was not hovering over this mountain, but over a strange looking tree, thousands of feet tall, limbless and leafless, as if was hibernating.  
  
Underneath the seam, Nakia saw a woman fall to her death.  
  
Nakia gripped Okoye’s spear in her pocket and leaped off the mountain. She felt her feet being torn apart as she slid down the icy gravel of the hillside, but she raced forward. Nakia could hear a scream.


	6. Chapter 6

  
**Part III: The Battle**  
  
Groot had his hands over his ears, crouched down on the ground behind the dome. Sam stood above him protectively, watching Peter weave a small web between Groot's temples and shoulders, a thick curtain meant to block out the world.  
  
Nakia couldn’t take her eyes off the seam which meant she couldn’t take her eyes off Gamora.  
  
“Let's review what we know,” Nakia said, eyes glued to the woman perpetually being murdered. Sam turned towards her, his face grim but his eyes bright. His arms were glowing, a beautiful feathery pattern illuminating his skin. He didn’t seem to notice, but Nakia peripherally took it in.  
  
“The seam is the way out,” Nakia started. “I can pierce it with my spear. Outside all of this, everyone we know and love is fighting Thanos, but he is nearly all powerful because of his gauntlet which has six infinity stones, one of which we are in. We are in the stone that he was able to retrieve by killing her—”  
  
Nakia pointed at the struggling Gamora.  
  
“He got the stone because he killed someone he truly loved,” Nakia finished.  
  
“Which doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Sam said, simmering, the pattern on his arms pulsing slightly with heat.  
  
“Right,” Nakia said. “But it worked.”  
  
Peter was now humming to Groot from his perch on his web.  
  
“Maybe this is it,” Sam said, gesturing towards Gamora and the seam. “Maybe this is what Strange meant. It worked but it was weak. I mean, you don’t kill someone you truly love.”  
  
Nakia shrugged and said, “Okay, but it worked, Sam.”  
  
“Nakia,” Sam snapped. “Who do _you_ truly love, hmmm?”  
  
Nakia’s mind was immediately filled with her family members and old friends, T’Challa and Shuri’s faces, her classmates and companions from her travels; but most prominently, most steadily, without her permission, as solid as earth itself, Okoye’s shining face overtook her thoughts. Her warm brown shoulders, reflecting the sun as they walked together through the foothills of Wakanda; her sincere gaze, as she dressed in the clothes of Dora Milaje for the first time; her voice, resonant and pounding, the most beautiful voice in all of Wakanda—the voice that had always and would always call her back—  
  
“Imagine tossing them off a cliff, see how that makes you feel,” Sam continued, pseudo-cheerful and humorless.  
  
Nakia was flame again. Sam leaped back at the burst.  
  
“I wouldn’t,” she choked out.  
  
“Is there anything, any ambition, any world you would save that would make you?” Sam asked, his eyes piercing.  
  
Nakia met his gaze and they regarded each other quietly.  
  
“Was Thanos trying to save a world?” Nakia asked.  
  
“No,” Sam replied. “But he definitely believed he was.”  
  
And that Nakia understood.  
  
“You’re saying Thanos only succeeded because he believed what he was doing was worth it,” Nakia said. “But here she is, still dying. As if maybe he’s starting to realize it wasn’t worth it after all. As if maybe a very small part of him is waking up from his delusion.”  
  
Sam ran a hand down his face.  
  
“And you’re implying,” Sam said. “That we have to save her.”  
  
Nakia surveyed Gamora’s death once more. She appeared every few seconds hovering in the air, being strangled by an invisible hand, before being dropped off the edge and plummeting.  
  
“Everything in this world is externalized,” Nakia said, to herself, strategizing. “Everything here that is normally internal is made external.”  
  
“I’m really used to fighting symbolic wars,” Sam remarked dryly. “I’m American.”  
  
Nakia snorted.  
  
“Is that where you got your wings?” She asked. “Air Force?”  
  
He nodded, “Yeah. Pararescue.”  
  
And it clicked.  
  
“You can save her,” Nakia burst out, feeling the wheels turning in her head. “You should save her.”  
  
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” Sam asked, incredulous.  
  
“Fly!”  
  
~  
  
Sam wanted to scream.  
  
“No,” he said coldly.  
  
“You have wings on your arms right now,” Peter chimed in, unhelpfully.  
  
“No,” Sam said. “I don’t.”  
  
“I just ran across fire, Sam,” Nakia pleaded. “I had a conversation with an ancient panther-goddess. Peter is a spider. You can fly.”  
  
Sam was itching with irritation and longing. He couldn’t fly on his own. He simply couldn’t. The first rule of para-jumping, of piloting, is to never over-estimate your abilities. Without a parachute or plane, you fall and die. A good pilot is mentally grounded.  
  
Too much of this world they were in was fanciful. And maybe Nakia could grasp it, coming from the weirdly progressive and almost aggressively intellectual culture of Wakanda, and maybe Peter who is still not quite aware (hence the body of a spider) can grasp it because why not, but Sam was a human man who wants a house and a garden but knows there’s no way out of this eternal war.  
  
“I _can’t_ ,” he insisted.  
  
“That’s what your wings have always been for, though,” Nakia said. “For rescuing people, right? Maybe that’ll trump the system.”  
  
And that rings both wrong and right.  
  
_“You ever thought about making you own wings?” Steve asked._  
  
_They were sitting outside a cafe in Monteverde, watching the tourists hop on buses, taking them to go zip-lining over pristine rainforests, through the cool mist and sheltered green._  
  
_Sam had wanted to go again after their zip-lining adventure that morning, but that would have gone too deep into their funds. Being on the run was expensive if you just end up playing tourist._  
  
_“No,” Sam replied, stirring more sugar into his coffee. “Why?”_  
  
_“I mean,” Steve said. “It just seems like you really enjoy it, you know.”_  
  
_“Believe me, Steve,” Sam said. “Enjoy is not the right word for what I feel every time I gotta snatch your sorry ass out of the sky.”_  
  
 Sam blinked out of his memory, swallowing the desire to scream again.  
  
“This is so ridiculous,” Sam muttered. But he closed his eyes and concentrated.  
  
He thought of his first training rescue, with just regular chutes, the sense of pride he was drunk on the rest of the week. He thought of the first time he cas-evac-ed someone using the FALCON wings, how he had never loved engineering more than he had at that moment, when it had allowed him to go so deep into so impenetrable a place to rescue a downed soldier. He thought of every single time he pulled Steve up from certain death.  
  
“Mr. Wilson, sir, it’s working!” Peter shouted. Sure enough, when Sam opened his eyes he was hovering a few feet off the ground. His arms were golden and shedding a brilliant blurry light. He couldn’t make out the feathers but he could feel a fluttering along his skin.  
  
He fell to the ground in a heap.  
  
“I can’t,” Sam said. “It’s not strong enough.”  
  
That’s when the sky exploded and began to rain blood.  
  
~  
  
Marvel was fighting several wizards at once but in her periphery she saw the explosion rock across the battlefield and sky. The Valkyrie sent down a war-cry that met the reverberation head on and dissipated it, but those fighting on the ground were hit hard with a shock-wave.  
  
_Thanos must have realized_ , she thought, _Thanos must have realized what we’re doing._  
  
Marvel prayed that Shuri and the others were okay.  
  
~  
  
From high up in the clouds above this alien planet, Shuri and Tony worked furiously to mitigate the damage of Thanos’s blast. Their machine, their bridge builder, was crippled.  
  
“We can’t send someone in,” Shuri said, turning to Scott.  
  
“Are you sure?” Scott asked, already suited up to shrink.  
  
“If we send you in now,” Tony muttered from underneath the computer. “You definitely die and we definitely restart the Big Bang.”  
  
“So what do we do?” Scott asked, desperately. “Our end is still good right?”  
  
“Yes,” Shuri replied. “I just hope there's someone on the other side, ready to build their own.”  
  
“Shit,” Scott declared.  
  
~  
  
Okoye was covered in blood, quite a bit of which was her own. But Steve was taking most of the heavy blows so she could focus on pointed attacks, predicting the time jumps and responding first to the manipulations of reality.  
  
They moved like one mind now. They were exhausted but they weren’t defeated.  
  
Thanos’s grip on the stones was weak, his gauntlet already flawed. For all that Thanos held the glove protectively, possessively, he couldn't bring himself to risk more damage to his power over the stones. The crack in the metal reminded Okoye about what Marvel said, about a universe that does not lack justice.  
  
If Okoye could get her spear in that crack, they could disable him.  
  
For now, though, they had to meet his fists with their own.  
  
Through it all, Okoye felt Nakia, racing across the unconscious fabric of her mind, as if reminding her, as Nakia always made sure to do, _I’m coming back, I’m coming back, I’m coming back._  
  
~  
  
  
“He knows,” Groot said, darkly, looking up from his knees for the first time.  
  
Nakia shot him a concerned look but reached into her pocket and pulled out a small metal rod.  
  
Sam concentrated on the seam beyond Gamora and asked, “How do we get there?”  
  
“We fly?” Nakia said, almost apologetically.

"I was thinking," Peter said. Nakia and Sam bent down to hear him better over the patter the blood-rain. "Dr. Strange, he said he saw fourteen million futures, right? And that the right one, the one where Thanos lost, well it didn't match up with the one we were in."

As Peter talked, he wove a small ringlet, a crown almost, over the ridges on top of Groot's head. The smooth geometric patterns, delicately placed on the tough wood of Groot's cranium fluttered gently in a breeze--Nakia was forcibly reminded of the stories of old sprites.

'Well," Peter continued. "I've done the math, and fourteen million is actually a lot smaller than infinity."

Nakia blinked and then glanced at Sam who was gawping only slightly.

"I mean," Peter said. "It's kind of basic quantum mechanics here--you know. Infinite possible variations means that if I keep trying to walk through a wall, there's a chance I'll do it. It's a negligibly small chance, so like, in my physics class that's something we wouldn't pay attention to. But, I figured, we are inside a singularity. So..."

"If Dr. Strange looks into the future and sees fourteen million..." Sam prompted.

"He hasn't even come close to seeing them all," Peter finished.

Groot's eyes were slowly coming into focus. He reached up and gently plucked Peter from the top of his head and cradled the blue spider in his palm.

"You did the math?" he asked Peter.

"Dude," Peter said. "Did you know that some infinities are bigger than others?"

There was static, a sweet-smelling lightning burst, and suddenly teenage Groot's arms held a teenage boy. Peter slipped out of Groot's grip and patted himself down. His arms and legs were glowing a radioactive blue and on his wrists was a swirl of silver web. He plucked at the string and it unraveled slightly before tightening back onto his arm.

"Just like my homemade stuff," Peter muttered.

Groot stood up next to him and said, "Let's weave a fucking bridge."

~  
  
The storm kept blowing and Gamora kept screaming.  
  
While Peter and Groot weaved, Nakia and Sam regarded Gamora.  
  
“We have to save her,” Nakia said.  
  
“Maybe I can replace her,” Sam said.  
  
Nakia asked aggressively, “How would that help?”  
  
“I’ll be giving up something I truly love,” Sam said.  
  
“Well, if that is the case,” Nakia bit out. “Then I can also replace her. _You_ can open the seam and _I’ll_ just fling myself off this cliff.”  
  
“Ok, alright,” Sam said. “I just think we were lead here for a reason and that reason is that Thanos’s sacrifice wasn’t good enough.”  
  
“That doesn’t mean we have to make one better!” Nakia said. “Why do you and Strange think this is about sacrifice? Why are you so attached to that idea? Martyrs aren’t heroes, they’re just dead.”  
  
“They’re heroes if they die saving a whole universe of people!” Sam countered. “Some sacrifices are worth it!”  
  
“There is no inherent good in dying!” Nakia snapped back.  
  
“This isn’t dying! This is saving!”  
  
“So save yourself!”  
  
Nakia’s skin was as vibrant as an ember. The color had snuck back into her flesh—no longer was she made up of stars and crystals.  
  
There was a flash of lightning and the dark purple blood dripping beyond the dome was now frozen and sleeting. Peter and Groot were racing back across their masterpiece.

"We should go now," Peter said. "I don't think it will hold for long in this rain."

Both Sam and Nakia hesitated.

"Please," Groot asked, holding his hands over his ears again. "Please, let's leave."

They walked across slowly, careful not to slip on the icy and bloody surface. The mountains in the distance were being torn down by the storm, fading into a sandy starry night like a million years were nothing.  
  
The fabric of the sky when they reached it was crystalline but silky. The golden thread holding the whole world together was vibrating with some unheard melody.  
  
Nakia stepped forward, thrust her arm out and a beautiful spear erupted from her small metal rod. She twisted gracefully in her hands and brought the tip up to the thread. She slipped it under a stitch, like the world’s largest seam-ripper, and pulled.  
  
The thread stretched but didn’t snap.  
  
Nakia tried again and again. The thread held fast.  
  
“This is a vibranium spear,” Nakia grunted. “If this doesn’t work, nothing does.”  
  
Just as she went for it again, Gamora’s scream, a lighting strike, and a rolling thunder all erupted at once. The bridge cracked in two and Sam whipped around to see nearly all of it falling to the ground below. There, past the smoldering ozone air left behind in the track of the lightning bolt, Gamora was being thrown off the edge once more.

His vision smarted and for a split second, he was witnessing the events of someone else's life: a beloved sister reaching for her, a baby Groot sleeping on her shoulder, an innocent world, bright and full of people, a hazy dream of a complicated but affectionate future...  
  
Sam remembered the first time he strapped on his wings, no mission, no training other than to fly. He recalled the rush of atmosphere, the edge of starlight just beyond the clouds, and he thought, _T_ _hat’s what I want back._

And he thought, That’s _what I want to return to her._  
  
Whoever she is, this Gamora, who Groot loved so much. Whatever joy and beauty in her life she had longed for before her unjust execution. Sam knew it his bones, the longing of a trillion different souls, robbed of their own preciousness, and a trillion more matching souls robbed of their love. Whatever dimension this was, the fifth, the sixth, the dimension of the soul meant that Sam could have wings.

He was crying as he ran and leapt, giving in finally to the song of his arms, tumbling through air and knowing it would catch him.  
  
He chased her to the bottom, wrapping his arms around her still warm body, pushing his wings against the air until they were soaring up above the ghost of Gamora’s murderer and the plain where certain things should never be judged. Above the golden orbs, the souls, longing for home--above the crystalline mountains and age-old stone trees--when he reached a gasp of thin cold air, where the fractal sky was still, he heard the swift buzz of dragonfly wings, beating like a drone against the fragile tesseract structure, asking it to crumble like entropy has always commanded it would.  
  
As Sam and Gamora shot past the edge, Nakia pulled the thread free.  
  
~  
  
Steve pushed Okoye behind him and the shield just in time to absorb Thanos's enraged purple attack. But just as they braced for the Power Stone's fury, Thanos's gauntlet exploded off his hand. They all watched as it launched into the air and came hurtling back down to land at Thanos’s feet.  
  
One heavy moment and then a bright light blasted from the Soul Stone, a great beam pointed up to the sky, shining millions of light years beyond the battlefield they stood on. Thanos stumbled back, his sword slipping from his fingers.  
  
The light intensified and with a great cracking sound a green light joined the bronze. The Time Stone had given in as well.  
  
With a roar, Thanos reached for his gauntlet, but the explosion of the red Reality Stone met the other two and sent him careening back.  
  
Steve pulled Okoye closer behind the shield, gazing slack-jawed and stupefied at the stones before them.  
  
In one final burst, the Mind, Space, and Power stones joined the other three, a supernova of bleeding singularities, collapsing in on themselves, re-entering the entropy of the universe once more.  
  
The battle paused as the shockwave pushed through the ranks and the crystals were de-crystallized, as existence re-lit its own light.  
  
Just as the Lights breathed their last, a collection of figures emerged.  
  
Dr. Strange stepped out, pale-faced, gray-bearded, and terrified, before crumpling to the ground.  
  
Groot stepped out carrying the body of a teenage boy.  
  
Nakia raced out, holding a spear woven out of yellow grass.  
  
And finally, with a last flare, out flew a man with wings holding onto a woman with a sword.  
  
Sam Wilson dropped Gamora at Thanos’s feet. She walked up to Thanos, where he knelt on the ground.  
  
“Hello, father,” she said.  
  
Gamora went for the head.  
  
~


	7. Chapter 7

**PART IV: THE GARDEN**  
  
Thanos’s severed head met the ground. Steve hardly paid it any attention.

Sam stood beside the gauntlet, golden wings sprouted from his shoulders, wearing what looked like pajamas featuring the night sky, splattered in a dark purple substance, strange and unreal but _there._  
  
“ _Sam,_ ” Steve barely managed to shout.  
  
Sam was running towards Steve before Steve could prepare for it. They met in the middle, wrapping themselves into one body. Steve felt the wings engulf his shoulders, Sam’s arms around his waist, Sam’s breath on his collar-bone.  
  
_Sam’s breath, Sam’s breath, Sam’s breath, Sam’s breath…_

In the space between their bodies, protected delicately by the light and cover of Sam’s wings, Steve reached into his own mind and retrieved a feeling of security, a ritualized rhythm humming in his veins—Sam’s breath was a more sacred rosary, a more dense faith, the best of Steve’s world.   
  
“Sam,” Steve whispered, his nose to Sam’s ear and his mouth to Sam’s jaw.  
  
Sam pulled back just enough to press his own lips to Steve’s face, his cheeks, his chin, his lips. Steve let out a muted sob, but caught onto his mouth with fervor.

A distilled emptiness released its stranglehold as they re-embraced on a dead war's battlefield.

Sam's wings faded into his skin--he sighed against Steve's neck.

"You smell rotten," he said, clutching at Steve's skin, rejoicing in the gift of his body, the gift of Steve's, and the a thousand other beautiful things he had not the capacity to name.

"Just for you," Steve said.

 _For me,_ Sam heard repeated in his head. _You are for me._

  
~  
  
The surrender was swift.  
  
~  
  
On a surprisingly comfy couch on the spaceship back to Earth, Sam sat next to Steve, his feet tucked underneath Steve’s thighs, playing with Steve’s large hands while he dozed.  
  
“How long was it for you?” Sam asked, running the tips of his fingers over the lines on Steve’s palm. Sam's golden wing tattoos shimmered as he moved. Steve had doodled a little on them earlier, so now they were as colorful and proud as a peacock's.  
  
“Hmm?” Steve asked, opening his eyes. “Wait, you think it was different for us?”  
  
“Steve,” Sam said. “You were there when we explained everything. You know it only felt like a day or two for us.”  
  
“I assumed there was a lot of in-between stuff,” Steve said, running his other hand of the top of his head, down his neck, before picking at a thread in his shirt.  
  
“You’re avoiding the question,” Sam said, raising his eyebrows at Steve’s fidgeting.  
  
“Two years and three months,” Steve said, squeezing Sam’s hand and meeting Sam’s eyes.  
  
Sam winced and felt himself tear up for what was probably the hundredth time in the last two days. He knew it was a much longer time than a couple days but he wasn’t expecting that.  
  
“You were faithful for that long?” he asked, trying for a weak smile.  
  
Steve rolled his eyes but then said softly, “I was in mourning for that long. Well, I’d say denial for the first year. Mourning the second. Battle-prep the last few months. I was pretty busy, if you can imagine.”  
  
Sam sagged forward, snaking his arms around Steve’s shoulders and pulling Steve’s head down to his chest. He pressed a series of kisses to Steve’s hairline and held on.  
  
Eventually, Steve nodded off again, this time peacefully pillowed on Sam while Sam hummed against his hair.  
  
Nakia found them.  
  
“They have dinner in the mess,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb. She eyed Steve warily. After finding out that Steve and Okoye had become best battle-buddies, Nakia had been as prickly as a cat around him.  
  
“He’s not going to steal her,” Sam had told her last night. Her response had been to flick his ear.  
  
“How are…things?” she asked when Sam made no move to get up for food.  
  
“You mean how are me and Steve?” Sam asked.  
  
She nodded.  
  
“We’re hurting but we’re good,” Sam replied simply, rubbing his thumb on Steve’s hip. “It was longer for them.”  
  
“Yeah,” Nakia said, her eyes curiously shiny. “Okoye still flinches when she sees me. Like she just can’t accept that I’m back.”  
  
Sam waited.  
  
“I always come back,” Nakia finished.  
  
Sam said nothing. He wasn’t sure what Nakia wanted from him. Sam didn’t really know Okoye well, not from their past brief encounters. Though if was he pushed to comment, he might tell Nakia to stop being so oblivious and hurt when someone like Okoye was literally devoted to her.  
  
It’s possible that comment might incite more than it called for.  
  
“She’s changed,” Nakia finally divulged unhappily.  
  
“Well,” Sam said. “It’s been awhile.”  
  
Nakia groaned, pulling at her curls, waking Steve up.  
  
“Whassup?” he mumbled into the drool pooled on Sam’s shirt.  
  
“Nakia is frustrated with the nature of time,” Sam said, fondly, pressing his lips against Steve’s forehead again.  
  
“Oh,” Steve said, stretching. “My old stomping grounds. How fun.”  
  
Sam laughed and watched the understanding dawn on Nakia’s face.  
  
“I don’t mean to complain—” she started, but Steve waved her off.  
  
“Nah, it’s fine,” Steve said. “It’s still a hard lesson to learn. My best pal before I went under is still, you know, my best pal, but it’s very different. And I can’t change that. So I get it.”  
  
Nakia nodded.  
  
“Thank you,” she said. “For protecting her.”  
  
“That’s cheesy,” Sam said.  
  
“Your welcome,” Steve said. “And thank you, as well.”  
  
Nakia left and Sam had the suspicion that she might not be as oblivious as she seemed.  
  
“Hey, Steve,” Sam said.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“When we get back home, we won’t be criminals anymore, right?”  
  
“Yeah, don’t worry about that,” Steve said, bemused. “The UN pretty rapidly backtracked as soon as half the world’s population disintegrated. We’re free men.”  
  
“Good,” Sam said. “Because I want to buy a house.”  
  
“Really?” Steve asked, sitting up, his lips stretching up into a surprised but delighted smile.  
  
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Near my family. Let’s buy a house. Settle down.”  
  
Steve was pink with pleasure. Sam’s own eyes were pricking with unshed tears.  
  
“I’d like that,” Steve whispered, brining his hand up to cup Sam’s cheek, leaning forward for a kiss.  
  
“Let’s buy a house,” Sam repeated against Steve’s mouth. “I want a garden.”  
  
~  
  
“I guess I don’t really understand,” Dr. Strange said to Captain Marvel.  
  
They sat together at the Avengers facilities a few days after their arrival home.  
  
“Wasn’t it your plan?” Marvel asked, struggling not to roll her eyes, sipping her herbal tea (Maria had banned caffeine, thinking that Carol's first panic-attack after seeing Maria alive and well again was probably something that could've been prevented had Carol actually been taking care of herself for the past two years).   
  
“Yes and no,” Strange said, scratching his goatee. “I saw some of it play out, of course. But it wasn’t quite the same as what ended up happening. I just knew really where Thanos’s weakness was.”  
  
“Gamora,” Marvel said.   
  
“Gamora’s death,” Strange corrected. “Gamora’s death, the bargain he made with an all powerful stone, and the basis for that bargain.”  
  
“He was deluded,” Marvel said, feeling like Strange was maybe being a little obtuse. “His faith in himself didn’t translate to reality.”  
  
“Yeah, exactly.”  
  
“To me,” Marvel said. “A lot of things had to happen at the right moment. But they did."  
  
“Maybe there’s a stone out there that has that power,” Strange said. “Maybe there’s a dimension above mind, one that can stand above Time, Space, Reality, Power, and Soul. Look down on what's happening. Manipulate it--”  
  
“Maybe this is all more complicated than a rock,” Marvel cut in.  
  
~  
  
Okoye stood outside her family’s farmhouse watching the sunrise. The rhinos down the road were making a ruckus but the sheep in these fields were slumbering in the wet grass. The morning was dewy and clear and the sweet smelling spring blooms were lingering on the edge of the cold night winds. Okoye leaned against the fence; between posts the spider-webs clung to the cool condensation, shimmering and sparkling in the silvery dawn light. The day was fresh.  
  
She heard horse hooves in the distance and her heart sprang to life, thumping Nakia’s name.  
  
_Probably not Nakia,_ Okoye thought matter-of-factly.  
  
They had been struggling to return to normal, ever since the end-of-the-universe ended. At first Okoye had assumed it was her, but as soon as they had arrived in Wakanda, things had been different with everyone, as far as Okoye knew. Nakia was still there, which was perhaps the most unusual, given that she hardly spent more than a couple weeks in Wakanda back before the whole war of existence. But it had been nearly three months since everyone’s safe return and the official cessation of mourning. King T’Challa was back, Princess Shuri was back in her lab, having fun with technology instead trying to save literally everything. The lost had been returned.  
  
Nakia was teaching, she was farming, she was leading volunteers on horse races, she was kayaking and dancing and doing everything she had always done when she was home. Except for talk to Okoye.  
  
“What is going on between you two?” One of Okoye’s Dora had asked after witnessing a trainwreck of a conversation between Okoye and Nakia a week ago. Standing in the market, on duty, didn’t give Okoye the chance to clutch her head and whine, “I don’t _know_.” But she likely wouldn’t have confessed that anyway.  
  
The horse-rider was getting closer but Okoye refused to turn around. She had her pride.  
  
A southern breeze blew like a chill kiss against Okoye’s legs and neck. She blinked slowly, the gray morning opening up even more for the bright gold of the sun.  
  
The rider was right behind her but not slowing down. Okoye snapped around, breath catching, but just as she registered Nakia’s face, Nakia was leading the horse up and over the fence. Okoye felt the rush of air from the jump on her face.  
  
The horse landed gracefully and Nakia guided him around so she could glare down at Okoye.  
  
“Where have you been?” Nakia demanded.  
  
“Excuse me?” Okoye said, taken aback.  
  
“Where have you been the past _three months_?” Nakia shouted, throwing her arms up. “Every time I so much as look at you, you run from the room! Where are you _going_?”  
  
“Me?” Okoye shouted back, loosing every bit of cool quick as a flash. “Where have _you_ been? You’ve been in the country for months and this is the first time you come visit? To yell at me?”  
  
Nakia continued to glower down at her. It didn’t take long for her to yield in the face of Okoye’s returning stare.  
  
“So you’re not giving up on me?” Nakia asked, petty and quick. "You haven't decided that I'm too much work, always dying and coming back to life and running you over with horses?"  
  
“What in the world does that mean?” Okoye responded acidly. “Giving up on you? When have I ever given up on you?”  
  
“There’s a first time for everyone,” Nakia said simply.  
  
“Not for me,” Okoye responded, too honestly. Nakia blinked in surprise.  
  
Without warning, Okoye felt her chest crumbling into a sob.  
  
“I — missed — you,” she gasped, trying to get control. The urge to cry was so immediate and heavy that her body couldn't manage it. She was heaving, gulping on air, needing to scream but finding no sound to latch onto. How was she to explain how she had _missed_ Nakia? As if _missing_ Nakia was in her heart and mind, internal and personal, and not the physical condition she had been waging a strange existential battle with for nearly two years.  
  
Okoye hardly noticed Nakia smoothly and swiftly dismounting her horse. But as Nakia approached, crossing five meters in two rapid steps, Nakia's pained expression cooled Okoye's breakdown. When they stood face to face, the sun tipped over the horizon. The silvery dawn floated easily away and Okoye's vision was overwhelmed by Nakia's watery smile and Nakia's shaking hands. Okoye forced in long breaths, hiccuping over the seize on her chest, wishing that she could reach out and run her thumb over Nakia's concerned eyebrow, hold Nakia to her breast until it stopped hurting to look at her. _She's real._  
  
“I talked to Bast while I was in there,” Nakia murmured.  
  
Okoye was speechless.  
  
“She accused me of running away from my problems,” Nakia continued, ignoring Okoye’s disbelief. “Wasn’t the first time that complaint was leveled at me. Most of the time I know it’s not true. People just have a lot of opinions about someone turning down the chance to be Queen.”  
  
Okoye swallowed, noticing a shift in the atmosphere. Nakia's hands were still twitching, but her voice was growing lighter, airier--a sure indication that Nakia was working her way towards a subject she thought important or terrifying.  
  
Nakia said, “But Bast wasn’t talking about my travels.” She looked east, catching the sunlight on her face. Okoye traced her profile, dear and familiar and curious, with her eyes, imagining that if she could only press her lips to the line of Nakia's nose, to the swell of her forehead, the tip of her ear, than she might remember how to cry properly and breathe properly and laugh properly.

“I’ve known something for a very long time," Nakia continued. "I've been so scared but I can't run from what's under my nose. I never wanted to, anyway." Nakia turned back to Okoye, grinning playfully, as she always has when reaching for her sincerest truths. A grin that made Okoye ache. “I can only commit.”  
  
“Nakia,” Okoye said hoarsely, barely making a sound, but communicating all the same. "I don't know what you're trying to say..."  
  
Nakia lifted her hands to Okoye’s face, her shaking dissolving as she held Okoye’s jaw firmly in her palms. She stepped closer. Okoye pushed into her touch on instinct, found she didn't much care anymore what Nakia was trying to say, so long as she just kept touching her.  
  
“We’ve always been there for each other, Okoye,” Nakia said tenderly and fiercely. "But I want more."  
  
Okoye was trying not to sob again.  
  
“I love you,” Nakia said, her voice wavering, her touch steady.  
  
Okoye did not have the capacity to respond, too busy choking on sobs again and reaching the breaking point for her grin. She brought her own hands up to Nakia's, opening her mouth to let loose finally what had been the burden of her heart for so many years, only to cough out both a laugh and cry instead of intelligible words. Never before had Okoye been so completely graceless and out-of-sync with her body. Nakia's nervous face looked as if it was crumpling under the pressure of her own affection and happiness. She smoothed her thumbs over Okoye's temple and let her head rest against Okoye's, not bothering to try and interpret the gibberish and sobs.  
  
Nakia laughed, but, as always, Okoye could hear Nakia's love. 

“ _Bast,_ you’re a mess,” Nakia whispered, dripping with relief.  
  
Then Nakia leaned in and kissed her.  
  
Okoye caught her sobs finally and pushed them down. Trembling, she clung to Nakia, the world a bright bronze as she closed her eyes against the flaring sun. Nakia’s warmth held her and Nakia’s soft mouth moved sweetly against her own.  
  
“Nakia,” Okoye finally managed. “I have loved you for so long—”  
  
Nakia captured Okoye’s mouth again.  
  
“I always come back to you,” Nakia said, pressing her forehead to Okoye’s, breathing deeply. “It’s a singularity.”  
  
~


End file.
